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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Yora" data-source="post: 8353110" data-attributes="member: 6670763">The more I am working on the specific for this campaign, the more I am amazed how stunningly easy it all looks.Take generic oldschool hexcrawl procedures and sub-systems, <a href="http://spriggans-den.com/2021/07/24/mapping-a-river-for-pointcrawling/" target="_blank">make a chart for the main river,</a> and it seems you're pretty much ready to go. I could never get on board with procedurally generated sandboxes, but with this premise it feels like a perfect fit. And by reducing the map from two dimensions to basically just one, it all looks so much less daunting. You don't need five directions which you have to anticipate at any time but only one, or in a few spots along the river two. And you don't need to worry about the complete map looking like a somewhat plausible natural environment. How the river winds exactly is irrelevant, as travel is always exactly along the river  with no point to take shortcuts.Feels like hexcrawling for noobs and lazy GMs who get turned off by creating a sandbox map. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />I think great parts of this game can be carried by properly designed random encounter tables that include encounters with other travelers and environmental events. For creating specific settlements and ruins on short notice, I absolutely recommend Worlds Without Number. This book was made specifically for this. (Though I like the B/X clone too.) And ruin sites don't need to be particularly large or have anything amazing in them. If the player go through them in 90 minutes and leave with a few baskets of bronze scrap, it was a full success.And the possibility to buy and equip larger ships as mobile base camps, or even establish trade posts in the wilderness should be a great way to spend all the money they are making from their hauls. Buying a few tons of tin ore from a remote family mine and getting a dangerously overloaded ship through hundreds of miles of pirate infested waters can be a great adventure in itself.I've only been tinkering with this for three days, and I feel like all that's left to do is develop the cultures of the humans that populate the lower river and explore the upper courses.I already had Yoon-Suin on my list, which does have it's own strange great river, but Qelong is a great recommendation. Read that one years ago, and I think I could actually drop that into this campaign pretty much as is. I think the setting style is very similar to what I want to go for.</blockquote>

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