Let’s Make a Hexcrawl Setting

[Sanglorian]

There’s no way in hell that my group is going to read enough background material to make an informed decision about what to do in the Shrouded Lands right off the bat so what I’m going to do is that instead of throwing information at them I’m going to make them work for the information. This means that the adventure starts on rails a bit but the tracks dead-end after introducing the PCs to the setting.

[...]

Sounds OK for an adventure to introduce players to this setting? What do you guys think?

Yeah, I think so. One thing I thought would be good is to package each class/race with a hex or two that's most relevant to that c/r. So northern dwarves could get Titan's Skull and something else, gnomes could get the one about them living in walls and maybe the one about the walls of Shuttered, etc. That way, everyone's linked to the setting but no one has to read the whole thing. And then, players can teach one another.

'Hey dwarf, what's an interesting fact about Titan's Skull?'
'Well ...'

OK, for ACKS the game splits the difference between race as race and race as class by having a few race-specific classes for each rare with all of the racial features baked into the racial classes.

[...]

Anything else?

You mentioned a 'nice duality' between the light spells of the King in Splendour and the darkness spells of She Who Waits, but I thought I should point out that it's Alberon who is She Who Waits' husband.

Regarding the bladedancers, I think it's a good fit for them to be priests of Alberon. Being lightly-armoured makes a lot of sense in the city.

Dwarven craftpriests seem to work well for the Speaker to Bronze, who seems to have played a creator role. Would they suit the faithful of the Drinker of Iron? Perhaps the dwarven fury would suit that more martial god.

I think the assassin is fine for the Temple Invisible guys, but if a player would love to play a mystic I reckon they'd have at least a few. I imagined the practitioners of the Stern Way as meditative martial artists, but in fact I think only the meditative part has been established in the setting.

A touch of the druidical makes sense for priests of the Green Lady (I got the sense that magister is a particular rank in the priesthood, rather than a term for all the priests, but I'm not sure). But I think charms would also suit them.

I think one halfling class is fine.

I think we have an orc ranger in the setting, so that's a class to consider. I'm not familiar with ACKS, but would it work to have 'monstrous warrior' and a 'monstrous ranger/explorer' classes, with slightly different abilities depending on whether you're an orc, or a gnoll, or potentially an ogre? Gnoll rangers are a D&D staple.

Another option for the gnomes would be southern gnome tricksters (we also have southern gnome assassins in the setting) and a northern gnome thief.

Gnoll bards would be great. I'd nix their spellcasting. The setting also mentions nordanbjorn bards, which might be worth considering.

I was thinking of the gnollish heart eating as a subsystem that anyone (or perhaps any gnoll) could invoke. Perhaps you could model it with proficiencies? If you wanted a class, perhaps a berserker/barbarian who enters different rages based on the hearts he/she eats?

Have you given any thought to how to model the Witch Clans? Maybe make the spells proficiencies that you can only take at 1st level?

Looking through a list of classes for the Player's Companion,

• What does the priestess do? If it's anything like I imagine it, it could be a good match for the priests of the Green Lady.
• The shaman class should come in handy, for the people of the corn and for monstrous humanoids.
• I feel that Thring is crawling with witches and warlocks. How are they mechanically different from the mage?
• The gladiator could come from the Wedding Band.

I don't know if it fits your idea of a standard party, but the nordanbjorn of the Shrouded Lands were taken directly from Bailywolf's class writeup for ACKS: [Sapient Bears+] a Nordligbjörn class for Adventurer Conquer King so if a player ever wants to be a talking bear, you know where to direct them...

[...]

The Green Lady is more difficult. She's kind of a Nimue figure at the borderland where Arthurian Christianity meets the older pagan traditions.

If your campaign ever makes it to the City of Shuttered Windows, I really recommend picking up a copy of Vornheim. It has a lot of general advice for city adventures but also a bunch of tables that would fit the flavour of Shuttered with minimal modification.

Another vote for Vornheim and the Nordligbjörn from me.

It's been established that elven mages/priests can summon elementals—I don't know if it was ever specified that that is a power granted by the Green Lady or not, but that could be a good place to start with a spell list.

 

[Daztur]

Wow thanks for so much feedback so fast, I only have a few minutes downtime but I'll use the sapient bear one and to counter nit-pick Alberon WAS married to She Who Waits but he dumped her for the Green Lady and then divorced the Green Lady (he's the Newt Gingrich of gods...). After that the Lion/King married She Who Waits (rather unwillingly) to Keep Bad Things From Happening.

As for Alberon he's more the god of control and order and civilization. So geas and the like certainly, but flamestrike would be more the sun god...

Harder to pin down the Green Lady's priests since we've had zippo about them aside from that they exist. Are they druids? What?

There's so many classes that I don't have to make the ones that haven't been killed out too much available.

Good idea for giving each class one hex to read, I'll have to edit things a bit but that should be very very workable.

 

[chutup]

You know, now I'm thinking about running a Shrouded Lands game as well, over Google+ for FLAILSNAILS players. Maybe basing the PCs in Newhill to start off with? That's got a ready-made dungeon right on the doorstep, and it's fairly close to the Kingswood, Brindlebrook Swamp, the hobgoblins, the marche and Severard's Town.

My real dream would be to set the PCs down in the Shuttered City, but I don't really feel confident enough as a DM to try to run a city-based game.

 

[Daztur]

More responses about critter classes when I've actually read all the ACKS such but it looks like priests of the Green Lady could be slotted in under the sylvan subclass of the Witch.

Oooh and total Shrouded Lands word count has just surpassed The Golden Compass. Now I'm starting to understand why George Martin takes so long to write his books, A Storm of Swords is over 3.5 longer than all of what we've written, oof...

New map: http://img13.imageshack.us/img13/5091/june4shrouded.png

The Cat Tree
Hex 34.05

Note: Some riffing off of one of chutup's blog posts here, plus a little bit of the Vorkosigan books, the jokes about cats killing wizards and balut...

There can be found a tree that is home to a flock of cats and they can be seen flying clumsily throughout much of the surrounding forest. The tree itself is a radiant sight with catflowers blooming in wild oranges and whites in the springtime that match the luster of the cats’ wings. The cats are not generally aggressive, although arcane magic does throw them into a violent frenzy, but they will attempt to entice travellers into approaching their tree. If they do so they will discover that the trees’ fallen leaves and its dense but shallow root network hide a treacherous crevasse where can be found the bones of several travellers who have fallen to their deaths and had their bones picked by a hundred dainty teeth. After a creature falls through the dense mat of roots, the roots regrow within a week hiding the crevasse from sight.

In the summer, the catflowers fall to the ground and catfruit slowly grows until young kittens, their wings wet with juice, crawl out mewling in the autumn. Picking a catfruit early is fatal to the growth of the kitten within. Cat feathers can fetch a good price in the Lands of the Night Cattle and beyond, with kittens young enough to train commanding an even higher one. Orcs, on the other hand, judge boiled catfruit to be a delicacy. If a pillow is stuffed with cat feathers and has the sleep spell cast on it then it will ensure a night of deep, restful and dreamless sleep. Shoving such a pillow violently into someone’s face will trigger the sleep spell.

Connects to: Tristifer Bartley (30.03) enjoys hunting these cats.

Hooks:
-Why do winged cats emerge out of fruit? Cats are not normally produced in such a fashion.
-Who is buying winged cat kittens?
-Any interesting loot at the bottom of the ravine among the bones? Who has died down there?

 

[Daztur]

To put my history geek hat on, the Shrouded Lands area is pretty small but there's a lot of different cultures packed in. In the real world you get a lot of cultures packed into a small area when travel is difficult. Think the Caucuses in which there's ten gazillion languages spoken in the area the size of England. The Shrouded Lands is the same way but instead of mountains that make travel difficult it's elves and monsters and crazy wizards that want to kill you. So even though an area like the Freeholds is tiny by real world standards most people (who aren't PCs) stay at home to avoid the killing and death and the burning so the other end of the Freeholds might is the same as a much longer distance in the real world in terms of cultural unity.

--------------------------------

OK, a while ago someone (Sanglorian?) said that we’d need some random content generators for random encounters as well as to cover what stuff that the PCs run into when they enter an empty hex. I’ve always thought that was necessary but was too lazy to write them but now that I have a game planned I’m actually going to get off my ass and get to work on it. Here’s my thoughts so far (some my ideas, some ripped off from some blog post that Monsters and Manuals linked to and some stuff from a forum post on therpgsite.com).

The first thing that you do is roll to see if a random encounter happens. How many times per in-game day you roll and what the likelihood of having an encounter depends on where you are and if you’re moving around. Random encounters could be critters or various locations that are small and haven’t had their exact location within the hex nailed down (Shuttered, for example, is not a random location).

There will be different random encounter tables for different regions. In some cases there would be one random encounter table for one of the regions in the compilation but for the bigger ones (like the Burning Lands) there would have to be tables for different sub-regions. In a lot of cases (especially the Kingswood) there would have to be separate day and night encounter tables. Each random encounter table would be numbered from 1 to 20. To see what you’ve encountered you roll 3d6 and add one or two if the party is really small and/or stealthy and subtract one or two if the party is really big and/or noisy (with possibility even bigger modifiers if the party is burning down the Kingswood or something but the results would cap out at 1 and 20). This could be converted to a d20 roll and use skill modifiers, but I’m trying to keep this edition neutral. Since the roll is 3d6 you get a bell curve so you can put the common stuff at around 10 with the rare stuff that is drawn to noisy PCs (usually nasty stuff) at the low numbers and stuff that can only be found by sneaky PCs (usually nice stuff) at the high numbers. So, for example, in the Kingswood daytime random encounter table Tehaar could be 1, which means that you’d almost never meet her but if you’re burning down the Kingswood while fighting a dragon in the middle of a rock concert then there’s a very good chance of her showing up.

In addition to the generic stuff, a few numbers would say things like (“or use an encounter keyed to the hex you’re in,” “or use an encounter keyed to a nearby hex” and “roll in a neighboring region’s random encounter table”). DMs could either just use the generic result or go look up what (if any) random encounters they should use instead.

So for example:
…
9. Deer or an encounter keyed to the hex that the party is in.
10. A wolf pack or an encounter keyed to a hex adjacent to the one that the party’s in (roll d6).
…

Hex 34.05 Keyed Encounters:
1-5: Flying cats.
6: Cat tree

That sort of thing. If you’re not in hex 34.05 and you roll “cat tree” as your random encounter either just ignore it (as the cat tree is in hex 34.05, not the one you’re in) or make up something like the cat tree has been transplanted or there’s a cat tree sapling or whatever.

Now that you’ve got your encounter you’re good to go. However, a lot of the time you want more information to work with so there would be additional optional charts that the DM could roll on if they just rolled up five orcs and can’t think of anything interesting to do with that.

The first of these charts would be the verb chart. It would be a list of verbs (probably numbered 3-18 with a 3d6 roll since I can’t think of any good modifiers for this, maybe a weirdness modifier to skew things towards and away from the more WFT results?) such as “guarding,” “hiding from,” “eating” or whatever. Then you’d roll on the first table again so you’d have two things interacting in some way. Such as “flying cats hiding from a wolf pack.” If you get a result that doesn’t seem to make sense, try to brainstorm a way of making it fit even if it’s weird (as the Shrouded Lands is nothing if not weird) or just ignore it or reroll. Since the numbers are on a bell curve you can put some strange ones (like “worshipping” or “communing with the dead ancestors of”) on the upper and lower extremes without having them come up too often.

If you STILL want more idea fodder there’d be two more optional tables. The first of these would be terrain features (the sort of little bits of terrain that are really helpful for spicing up D&D fights). These features could include things like small ruins, waterfalls, streams, bridges, etc. It’d again be a 3d6 roll with a negative modifier if the party is moving fast or has bad perception skill and a positive one if they have keen eyes and are moving slowly and carefully. So there would again be a list of twenty results and the low numbers would be the kind of things that careless parties could blunder into (“kobold snares”) while the higher number results would be things that only very observant people would notice like (“stream with a bit of gold dust at the bottom”). The final table would be a listing of “secrets” and would be unmodified unless your version of D&D has a luck modifier of some sort and would cover hidden aspects of the encounter such as “something is not what it appears to be” or even very specific things like “a door of the Holt is nearby.”

Then after the session the DM would go and incorporate the stuff that came up randomly into the canon of the setting. For example if ghouls only attack when the dwarf is on watch (becaues the dice say so) then from now on Shrouded Land ghouls have a hankering for dwarf flesh.

That ended up being longer than I thought explaining it would be. Obviously this will take some time to write up but a whole lot less time and words than all of the hex stocking we’re doing takes. I’ll write up one for the Kingswood for my first adventure and then add in other ones as they’re needed.

 

[chutup]

I like it. That sounds like a good efficient way of filling blank hexes and adding more stuff to the hexes that do have something (since, as has been discussed elsewhere, you will almost never fill up a six-mile hex to the point where it's "unrealistically crowded".) I especially dig the idea of the random rolls and improvisation feeding back into the canon. You could do the same for the actions of the PCs - not trying to overwrite what's been stated already (i.e. "the Furhoof Freehold is now a charred ruin after the PCs burned it to the ground") but just incorporating new hooks that they've generated through play.

Also:

The Lamplighters (17.06)

No more than eight miles separate the freeholds of the Furhoofs and the Verlimes, and they are in more regular contact than most freeholds due to the good clear road that is built between them. Ironically this road began as a track by which the two houses would raid each others' herds. After a serious battle was fought on the midpoint of the trail, a young Maud Verlime negotiated a treaty with the Furhoof patriarch, now long dead. Since then the families have worked together to maintain the road and the lamplighters.

Every 100 yards along the road there is a lamppost of iron, which glows with a pure white flame that was a gift from the Lady in exchange for a great service done to her by the Furhoofs. This flame burns on little fuel, but can still be extinguished normally, which is why there are backups kept in both the freeholds and in the lamplighters' tower at the halfway mark. Every evening the lamplighters set out from the tower to light the lamps, and every morning they return to extinguish them. The combination of iron and flame keeps at bay the monsters dwelling in the Shattered Citadel of the Verlimes (18.07), particularly the elven elementals.

Recently, one of the lampposts has been stolen, and there has been at least one report of an elemental wandering across the road late at night.

Hooks:
- Why did the Furhoofs and the Verlimes raid each other, and why did they later sign a treaty?
- What service did the Furhoofs do for the Lady?
- Who has stolen the lamppost?
- Would anyone ever try to extinguish the white flame for good?

Inspired by this book: http://cdn4.fishpond.com.au/0012/024/709/3898475/4.jpeg, which is sort of like a novel of what D&D would really be like - monsters everywhere and humans holed up inside high-walled towns.

The Goliards of the Sainted Foot
Additional information about hex 20.04

The Keepers of the Sainted Foot are an offshoot of the Church of Alberon, who were driven from the Shuttered City many years ago during the Time of Schisms. The foot that they hold sacred is that of the Archpoet, a composer of high liturgical poetry who led the monks as they fled north on the brink of starvation. While lost somewhere near the edge of the Kingswood, the Archpoet was told by his brothers that they had no more food and many were too footsore to continue walking. He replied: "Well, we shall have to dine on our feet, since they are of so little use to us." His laughter quickly spread through the whole company, and miraculously they subsisted on humour alone until they found sanctuary in the Freeholds.

Both his feet were mummified after his death, but one was later stolen from the monastery. Today the monks carry on his tradition by brewing a special beer that gains its flavour from the mummified foot, which is submerged in it. Some claim that this is a necromantic ritual, but the fact that the beer functions as holy water seems to disprove their claim.

When they are drunk upon the holy beer, the monks become goliards - part cleric and part jester, who perform ludicrous parodies of the rituals of the Temple Indivisible. One jape involves walking in a procession with a herring on a string trailing behind each man. Another ridicules the geasa of the Shuttered City by forcing visitors to the monastery to swear oaths to only talk in rhyme, to go everywhere facing backwards, etc. Through satire, the goliards hope to destroy the Temple Indivisible, but so far they have only been successful in causing mild irritation and scandal. Nevertheless, one high priest is advocating for a company of Dead Men (33.12) to be sent against the Brotherhood, and one of the Hundred Heresies is listed as "attaching a fish or other sea-dwelling creature to the posterior by means of string or cord".

Hooks:
- Was the salvation of the Archpoet and his brothers really a miracle?
- What poetry did the Archpoet write?
- What happened to the Archpoet's other foot and where is it now?
- Tell me about some other satirical rituals of the goliards.

(Goliard - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

 

[Electric Wizard]

It's cool that you guys are starting to put the setting to good use! I would join in, but it's pretty hard to find a gaming group in China, and my connection to Google + is unreliable on good days.

So here's a location for a Newhill start-up:

The Fat Friar Inn
Additional information about Hex 17.07. Connected to Hex 34.04

The Fat Friar's cozy, quiet atmosphere is almost unnerving to travelers ducking in from Newhill's rough-and-tumble lanes. The common room is a stone cellar warmed by a great hearth and crowded with small tables and cushioned stools. Rodolf, an immense, gregarious fellow, runs the place. He leads songs and strums his mandolin with revelers late into the night.

The Fat Friar is most famous for its beds. Even the most tormented, addled heads can find peaceful slumber when they rest on the inn's pillows. Rodolf's secret is the three feathered cats (34.04) he keeps in cages. He meticulously gathers their down and feathers to fill his pillows.

Last month, three of Rodolf's cat-feather pillows disappeared. Shortly afterward, mystified and embarrassed travelers began admitting to being ambushed by a masked figure near the palisade gates. Their accounts are similar: A pillow to the face, and waking up hours later stripped of everything valuable. Rodolf quietly offers gold for returned pillows to adventurers he deems trustworthy.

Hooks:
-How did Rodolf get three feathered cats?
-What troubled minds lay their heads to rest at the Fat Friar?
-The pillow bandit clearly has one of his missing pillows. What has happened to the other two?
-Who is the pillow bandit? Where is his/her lair?

 

[Sanglorian]

After that the Lion/King married She Who Waits (rather unwillingly) to Keep Bad Things From Happening.

Doh! You're quite right.

You know, now I'm thinking about running a Shrouded Lands game as well, over Google+ for FLAILSNAILS players. Maybe basing the PCs in Newhill to start off with? That's got a ready-made dungeon right on the doorstep, and it's fairly close to the Kingswood, Brindlebrook Swamp, the hobgoblins, the marche and Severard's Town.

If you're gaming in the Shrouded Lands I'd definitely be interested in joining in! I do think the north-east is a nice place to start: it has a lot of small-scale stuff like taverns and pools and stuff. Perhaps the most natural progression would be for characters to follow the same course we have: starting out in the Freeholds, moving along the Welt Road, checking out the Kingswood, then discovering the Shuttered City and going south to the Burning Lands.

To put my history geek hat on, the Shrouded Lands area is pretty small but there's a lot of different cultures packed in. In the real world you get a lot of cultures packed into a small area when travel is difficult. Think the Caucuses in which there's ten gazillion languages spoken in the area the size of England. The Shrouded Lands is the same way but instead of mountains that make travel difficult it's elves and monsters and crazy wizards that want to kill you. So even though an area like the Freeholds is tiny by real world standards most people (who aren't PCs) stay at home to avoid the killing and death and the burning so the other end of the Freeholds might is the same as a much longer distance in the real world in terms of cultural unity.

Good point, although I'm not sure that there is that much cultural diversity in the Shrouded Lands. I think of everything from the Hills of Gore to the Witch Clans, including Thring, and up to the former Verlime Duchy as being basically the same culture—it was (at least in my imagination) all the Kingdom of Gore at one point.

Chutup: I love the Golliards!

The Restless Dead (more information for the White Road, 29.13)

Court necromancers and hedge mediums have long speculated on what causes the dead to return to life. Surely the process that conjures back a warhorse from a skin bag is different to the bindings that draw bone golems together.

But what is broadly agreed is that—at least for humans and talking animals—undeath requires anonymity. Skeletons—about whose past little can be discerned—are more powerful than zombies, and jumbles of many bones are some of the most persistent of the dead.

Of course, no one is more anonymous than yet another corpse in the big city, and for this reason people are buried along the White Road. Their tombs include careful (and embarrassingly honest) accounts of their lives so that should you come back as a ghoul or spectre, anyone who happens to have read the story of your life can talk you back into your grave.

Shuttered City funerals are festive, but not celebrations of the person’s life: celebrations encourage rose-coloured glasses, exaggerations and white lies. In fact, no one receives louder applause at a funeral than a person’s worst enemy who, it is believed, will describe one’s faults best and most memorably of all.

Hooks
What happens if you mix the bones of humans/talking animals and other animals?
What of the poor, whose bones are ground up to make the road? Isn’t that the most anonymous fate of all?
The opposite effect seems to function for non-talking animals—the warhorses are all storied and famed. Or is there something else going on here?
Whose history has been lied about the most?
This would explain why all ghosts have mysteries associated with them. But why do most people who are not well known not come back as undead?

 

[Daztur]

The White Road, The Wailing Road
Hex 26.13

Inspired partly by: Man-Eating Wizard Roads | Rolang's Creeping Doom

The Sages say that the more anonymous a corpse the more likely it is to be restless in its death. This explains many funeral ceremonies that take place across the lands. But what then of of the poor of the City of Shuttered Windows (29.14), whose bones are ground up to make the White Road (29.13)? Isn’t that the most anonymous fate of all? Indeed it is, which is why one of the greatest works of the servants of the Necromantic Office is to keep the road quiet.

However, as one nears the end of the White Road, before the paving of bone dust peters out as the trade road approaches Winds (23.11), the necromantic bindings begin to weaken and the road grows restless.

On certain dark nights the road has been known to rise up and consume whole caravans and even change its course, the voices of ten thousand angry dead gibbering in a cacophonous chorus. However, when the morning dawns the road always quiets and is forced back into its proper course.

However, even on those nights when this far stretch of the White Road seems quiet it not so. It is only that the upmost layer of the road has been bound in place while the lower strata of bone dust wails and moans and woe to him who digs down into the dust of the White Road at night for he is surely lost.

This is the source of the winds that blow through the caves below the aptly-named town of Winds. They are the screams of the unquiet dead of the white road that filter through the dark caverns that lead down into the Sunless Sea before reaching Winds.

The fames windseers of Winds are those who are able to recognize the winds for what they are and listen to the voices of the dead and glean wisdom from it, hopefully without going completely insane.

Hooks:
-What is the Necromantic Office? Who (what?) are its servants?
-Have the spells binding the White Road ever been lifted to, for example, eat an invading army marching down the road.

 

[Sanglorian]

Love the direction that you took that, Daztur.

The Town Beyond the Lamps: Aggoth (18.06)

Aggoth is a small town with hardened, dour residents. They begrudgingly provide beds and gruel for travellers, but insist that the cast-iron shutters that secure every window remain tightly closed during the night.

It seems like every other week the village performs a ritual of cosmic performance. The residents gather in the eastmost field and burn a wicker man, or wear antlers and leap over a great fire, or celebrate the coming of age of their daughters by having them dance around the lonely tree that grows just outside the edge of the Kingswood.

The villagers insist that these rituals placate the fey of the Kingswood. Certainly, during the rituals you can see amber eyes reflected in the Kingswood. Watching—or waiting.

Hooks:
Are the rituals truly necessary, and do they ward off what they are supposed to ward off?
Do the people of Aggoth know anything about the disappearance of the lamppost?
What is the significance of each of the three rituals described?
What is the relationship of the Aggothians to the Verlimes and the Furhoofs?

The Chequered Room (26.17)
This large cave is far under the earth, but well connected to other parts of the deep. In its centre, tiles of ivory and of a strange black substance have been laid to make a board of alternating colours. The cave, like those around it, is cold.

On some of the squares are stone statues. On others are blocks of ice entombing humanoids. By the side of the board is rubble, ice and flesh, as if some of the pieces had been smashed.

The stone pieces are supposedly the petrified victims of a medusa, but who or what she has been playing against is unknown. It is also unclear when the last move was made, though by a pattern in the dust it appears one of the frozen pieces has recently been moved.

Hooks:
What is the strange black substance?
Who is playing? How long have they played for?
What are the stakes?
Is anyone important among the pieces?
What are the rules of this strange game?