Foundations: Defining the Baseline

Should we create a Hex-Crawl or a Point-Crawl?

  • Hex-Crawl

  • Point-Crawl

  • I'm fine with both


Results are only viewable after voting.

DangerousPuhson

Should be playing D&D instead
If you really want to differentiate humanoids, you need to do it by culture.

Caveat: You need to do it by DEMONSTRABLE culture. Saying that the bird-people of Alcatraz Mountain are really cool because they use eyeballs as currency and eat only a very specific kind of rock frog means nothing unless the party finds them chowing down on rock frogs and that looting their corpses always yields bags of eyeballs.
 

Grützi

Should be playing D&D instead
Beoric said:
Not sure that slapping a bird head on what is essentially a goblin or orc really changes much.
Worked for the Egyptians and their gods :p

Addendum:
Culture CAN be influenced or developed by looking at the biological factors of a species. A species without eyes or perfect nightvision will have a very different relationship towards light than a "normal" one.
This can even be used to put in a stark contrast to other more "normal" races in the setting. A unique culture that developed from some strange biological peculiarities is much stronger than some window dressed cut and paste culture.
I also agree with everything DP said:
The party needs to have a chance to meaningfully interact with the culture and see and feel their unique ways for themselves.
 

Ice

*eyeroll*
These are excellent criticisms. Thanks

I think we could get a lot of millage of making some kind of high-altitude Frog people. Since I assume we are running with kind of Peruvian/Tibetan theme, there should be a few small lakes/ponds/marshlands where these guys could fit in perfectly. After reading a few articles about them, it would be easy to separate them from regular old Bullywugs, while still using mostly the same stat block if we wanted.



Basically, they would have translucent skin with green or blue bones and not croak. they would live in and around high altitude lakes (birth pools). They could have poisonous skin. Their natural enemies could be fungus men.

They could raise giant flies/mosquito in some kind of weird insect-farm and (maybe) ride on giant cockroaches (this one is pretty silly, imho.)

Culturally, their holy people have some kind of weird philosophy about the different stages of life (egg, tadpole, frog, death) and how that relates to the universe. Their god could be a frog sticking a tongue up his ass, symbolizing the circle of life (this is silly again).

Tibetans believe that the lakes in the Tibetan plateau are sacred and avoid fishing them. If we imported that believe into whatever human culture is going to populate this hex crawl, that could explain why these Frogmen continue to exist.

Also, maybe if you smoked the frogmen's skin you could have some sort of psychedelic effect. Maybe one of the less scrupulous human cultures in the area wants frogman pelts so they can get high out of their mind (and worship some kind of psychedelic deity or something).

Just brain-storming, let me know what you think. I won't take it personally. Also feel free to springboard off of this.
 

DangerousPuhson

Should be playing D&D instead
I really dig the frogmen Ice. Gonzo but not ridiculous gonzo; just the right amount of weird/alien without being unrealistic (for fantasy anyway). Very different from Bullywugs!

I say we go with it - good for secondary sites, prevalent NPCs, maybe even the small dungeon (old spawning pools? frogmen graveyard permeated with psychedelic gasses?). Would also work to throw around a few frogmen glyphs that warn of danger or give hints to secrets, but only once the party figures out how the hell to decipher them.
 

Grützi

Should be playing D&D instead
I'm all in for Frogmen ;)

Love the translucent/colored bones thing. Maybe different tribes have different colors on their bones or their casters have runes inscribed to their bones. Would really go well with the discovery theme, as groups could easily distuingish between different tribes by bone color/glyphs but still had to learn what exactly is different about them.
 

Beoric

8, 8, I forget what is for
Are they wholly transparent, or just with transparent bellies like glass frogs?

I note glass frogs are arboreal, it would be a nice switch if the frogmen lived in trees (and we wouldn't have to worry about trying to write an underwater adventure that doesn't suck).

Also, one of the species of glass frog reflects infrared light, which would mess with your infravision. So they are transparent during the day, and nearly invisible at night.

Of course, the transparency is so distinctive, you could have arboreal transparent-skinned humanoids and drop the frog thing entirely.
 

The1True

My my my, we just loooove to hear ourselves don't we?
One question though, when we say "re-skinned humanoids" and "Demi-humans" what do we mean?
I'm a big fan of sentient evil races, but I've noticed a lot of OSR people run predominantly humanocentric campaigns with no humanoids and only a few monsters. I like elves and orcs but as a nod to the low-fantasy people I'm suggesting we take a humanoid that everyone's utterly familiar (and bored) with and put some gnarly twists on it. Say...goblins for example. Make them intelligent but utterly alien in their thinking. Make them cannibalistic (devouring their prey alive) and give them a terrifying edge by making them prone to wave attacks or having a horrific means of reproduction (sewing their egg clutches into their captives' stomach cavities to gnaw their way out in 1d3 days). They're a vicious, invasive species that nobody saw coming and the longer they cling to survival, the more advanced they become, paralleling the PC's advancement.
 

The1True

My my my, we just loooove to hear ourselves don't we?
As for the survey question, I think we should have BOTH. When an objective has been unlocked, a simple point (or better yet PATH) crawl should be laid out with it. But if PC"s want to just clear away the black from the wilderness map (which I find tremendously engaging as a player), that hex map gazeteer is always available (and makes it easy for us to devise and construct Point/Path Crawls).
 

The1True

My my my, we just loooove to hear ourselves don't we?
I heart DP's Wasteland idea. It gives us an unmapped realm of lawlessness ripe for exploration. We've got the struggle of minor factions good and evil and this over-arching theme of crushing Law versus deadly Chaos between the Industrial Machine and the Free Peoples all while this force of all-encompassing destruction slowly emerges and grows from below/beyond. That gives us real potential for later name-level and realm-management play down the road.
Instead of alternate realities, consider emerging structures; the earth cracking and crumbling as alien installations shake off the rubble of aeons to loom once more above the landscape, some even taking to the sky above! Old landmarks or places of safety or sanctity are wiped out one-by-one as events transpire or the characters explore further afield. The automated/preprogrammed inhabitants of this awakened alien evil slowly grind to life, bringing systems online, preparing the way for their masters, offering the opportunity to re-explore once dusty and ruined dungeon halls. And meanwhile their awful ancient experiments escape into the surrounding lands, giving us an opportunity to introduce weirdness into a low-fantasy environment. I make it all sound like techmology but I'm actually imagining ancient mysterious arcana and I use the word alien not in the sense of 'from another planet' but more not of this world...
This definitely fits the novice level trial by fire idea. The PC's propel background events further by retrieving some form of artifact and freeing an alien evil in the process. They can mitigate this to some degree through good play (and their should be rewards to show the players they at least had some degree of agency in the outcome), but in the end something gets out and things begin to happen. Maybe end the first adventure with our heroes (having the opportunity to) coming to the defence of their home base (or not) as waves of unknown abominations threaten to overwhelm it.
Another benefit of the Wasteland is that it can occur in any form of basic biome, so you can have mountainous wasteland, swampy wasteland, forested wastes etc. Place our starting points in more benign chunks of the region so maybe everything in a 5-6 hex (big fan of 1 Mile hexes here) radius is okay for basic wilderness activity and then start piling on the complications very gradually the further out we go. It also allows us to create corridors through the difficult (but rarely impossible) terrain which can inform the creation of Point/Path maps.
Our otherworldly evil (it might not even be evil, just completely inhuman and uncaring which has the potential to nettle high-level clerics, paladins and other servants of Good) can easily have connections to (or still be located in) distant planes and dimensions, allowing us to expand exploration of seemingly small chunks of terrain into mysterious outer realms as well!

Sorry for the TL/DR there folks. The stuff I've been reading here so far often has me almost too excited to read to the end, wanting to rush to the Reply button and get in my own comments, but it's been worth it! Some insanely creative stuff getting poured into this right now. Go team!
 

DangerousPuhson

Should be playing D&D instead
I heart DP's Wasteland idea.
In case anyone glossed over it, he's talking about this.

I have a further idea though, where we can combine the mountain idea with the wasteland idea: The Mountain of Exile! Take most everything I've done on that earlier post, and replace "Badlands" with "Mountain".

Exiles are dumped there (by airship?), and the mountain is so tall/treacherous it's nearly impossible to climb down. So they form their camps and bandit clans and whatnot. Then the Exiles find evidence of The Vanished People, first by the strange translucent frogmen tribes which populate the Western face, and their ancestral stories which claim they had "woken from within the glass cages". Massive steel doors are found in caves with no way to open them. A playing child falls through a crumbled roof into an antechamber filled with runes he can't read and sights he can't describe.

One day, a great tremor shakes the mountain - an eruption not of lava, but of beasts - and for weeks afterwards ambushes by alien creatures become more and more common. Many of the great doors are now opened! Missionary camps and hermit caves are emptied in the night following screams and bloodshed. Bandit groups and Rehabilitation teams join forces in fearful self-defence. Once-friendly Frogmen villages pull away in xenophobic terror, while others march to war against someone, anyone, to blame.

When the Exiles muster the courage to delve into the first opened vaults and begin passing around recovered trinkets, that's when the Conglomerate takes notice - a swarm of airships blots out the sun! Armed, uniformed men rappel into settlements and enslave everyone, regardless or intentions or status. Every man, woman, and child is put in chains and made to work. Every crevice and cave is plumbed, every great door is drilled and pried and forced. The Conglomerate wants whatever the Vanished People were hiding within the mountain, and their ruthlessness is blind in its severity.

Resistance cells form to free loved ones and push back the uniformed invaders. Mercenaries and bandits prey on anyone with means of payment. Explorers and Archaeologists await pauses in the chaos to slip inside the vaults of The Vanished People unnoticed. What could these progenitors have been keeping down there, and why was the mountain awakened?
 

The1True

My my my, we just loooove to hear ourselves don't we?
Cool.
Not a big fan of the airships though... I'd prefer to see magi-tech as a product of the mysterious ancients. Unless you're saying this Conglomerate is itself otherworldly? A long dormant foil to the Vanished People.
 

DangerousPuhson

Should be playing D&D instead
The airships are my way of depositing people on the mountain. If you can think of a better way, I'm all ears.

The Grand Staircase maybe? Or perhaps the mountain is a sort of Purgatory that people go after death, and the Vanished People were demons?

Now that I think of it, there's a couple good "twist" ways to do The Conglomerate - rivals of the Vanished People (responsible?), otherworldly types in disguise (angels or demons?), or maybe they ARE the Vanished People, returning for their stuff...
 
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Grützi

Should be playing D&D instead
I'm not that big a fan of the whole Conglomerate thing. But thats mainly because I don't like the east india trading company vibe I get from that, kind of demystifies a part of the setting for me. Airships are another part of that ... too much explained technology kind of takes away from the innate mystery of a setting.

That being said I love the rest of the pitch ;)

Size of the thing
I kinda envision a rather grand plateau with hidden valleys, big cave systems and treacherous mountains right now.
Big enough for explaration, yet small enough to make sense as a closed off location.

Barrier
We'll need some kind of barrier or at least a minimal explanation for why people aren't swarming the place.
DP's Idea of getting on the mountain/plateau only by air is solid ... but I don't like it for the reasons above.

A few random ideas/pitches from my side
The whole mountain/plateau is kind of a "in between" place. It's somehow shifted away from the prime material plane by a certain degree. So people don't really know it exists yet from time to time people end up there by accident. I'm thinking about a lost world style of thing. There are some rumors and legends, yet nothing definite. Over the years people became trapped in the place and build their own "civilization", yet there are also natives (frog people) there.
Maybe the whole thing connects to different realities or planes. Maybe it was specifically built by the lost civilization for this purpose or it was shifted away to imprison some ancient evil.
The whole plateau could be used to travel from one plane to another if one knows how to do that.

Do you guys know the "game" Mountain from steam? It's not really a game but rather some kind of bonsai tree for your desktop. You have a little floating mountain that changes over time ... nothing more. Not much to do here from a gaming perspective but I always loved the imagery of the thing just floating there.
31

A few other ideas:
Maybe our mountain/plateau slowly rotates? Like the whole thing sits on some giant plate that rotates the whole thing once a week or so.

Parts of the landscape could be shifted closer to certain elemental planes. Earth being the logical one ... but the higher you go the "closer" you are to air, deeper --> Fire, near lakes --> water.
Could be used to change some rules in a fun way and make exploration more interesting (and dangerous) for groups.
 
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The1True

My my my, we just loooove to hear ourselves don't we?
The airships are my way of depositing people on the mountain. If you can think of a better way, I'm all ears.
It's a 1st level game, so we don't really need a way in. Our three starting settlements are where our PC's come from. Definitely there should be one or two ways out of the region so people can leave if they hate it and fresh merchandise (or new PC's) can get in to some kind of trading destination. If we need an 'in media res' starting hook, we can come up with a summons to the village elder or an attack on the walls or whatever to get people interested but not tie them down if they want to just explore.

I really don't want to get to trippy with the setting. Slowly introducing the uncanny is cool, but we pretty much unanimously voted across the board for some degree of grittiness and that to me implies some level of low-fantasy, medieval realism. I was riffing on DP's Conglomerate and imagining fleets of modded Githyanki (I guess Githzerai are the Lawful ones, but they don't have the cool Astral ships. Moot point since they're all intellectual property I guess). But that's far out stuff there. If we work it in bit by bit though, it does have an element of that Moorcockian, 70's high-fantasy to it that has been making DCC super groovy for a while now...

Anyway. I really like that wasteland idea. If people are keen for mountains (a tough terrain type for starting level players) we could start the action in a mountainous (and maybe sheltered) region of the wastes. It's an awful part of the world, so thus far, no kingdom has laid active claim to it and it has become a refuge for the Exiles. Definitely as riches start to be found this might draw the interest of the powers that be and lead to interesting name-level play down the road.

If different players want to start in different settlements; let them do some independent role play for as long as patience/game-time will allow and then gently propel the action to a meeting at the main Dungeon where conflicting factional obligations/expectations contrasted with the need for cooperation can come into play!
 

DangerousPuhson

Should be playing D&D instead
It's a 1st level game, so we don't really need a way in.
Well, I mean, I meant it as a way in for everybody else - to explain how this seemingly disconnected world of Mega-Mountain is somehow swarming with people already. But it sounds like the consensus is that everyone but me hates airships, so I suppose the idea is nixed.

I totally agree though that we are taking the pendulum too far the other way, especially for the first few low-level adventures. This is dipping into extra-planar stuff, which isn't something anyone identified on the Must Have/Do Not lists. It just sounds like trying to take the thing into "failed Novelist" territory, and that stuff is cooler to look at from the outside than it will be to play in. Players want tangible concepts they can grasp while on the ground, and I think there are far simpler ways to communicate soft barriers to the areas of play than "extra-dimensional reality which only show up in the Prime Material on a blood moon" or wherever this is headed. Needs to be more grounded, is the crux of what I'm getting at.

Allow me to defend the Conglomerate for a bit though, if not as a sort of evil corporation then as a obvious human(oid) antagonist.

First, we wanted a looming threat and a ticking clock - well, while rival adventuring parties are good for putting that stuff into small spaces like dungeons, the Conglomerate is basically the rival adventuring party extrapolated onto a large scale. There is method in their evil - unlike the East India Trading Company, they aren't doing this for profits; this is apparent at all the dig sites they are setting up. The Conglomerate is obviously looking for something and the players will instinctively know (because the Conglomerate are doing it in an evil way) that when they find what they're looking for, shit is going to hit the fan. Looming threat established in an easy-to-understand, minimal exposition way.

Second, we get emergent faction play from their presence too - they are a big enemy, and big enemies unite factions and spawn resistance movements. The Conglomerate's arrival is the core of the power struggle in the area. The raison-d'etre for a few factions, and for unusual alliances, and for betrayals, and exotic mercenary groups, and secret operations... there's just a lot of chaos that something like the Conglomerate causes, and it's great for a mini-sandbox because it allows DMs to generate a TON of NPCs, character motivations, adventure sites, and side-quests. There will be lots of potential for side-missions to slow the Conglomerate down (ambush supply routes, free slaves, assassinate overseers, steal their maps, drive them out of dig sites, etc.), which sets back the ticking clock (something key to Ticking Clock campaigns is the agency for players to buy themselves more time). And it has potential to bring characters to new places, just by virtue of "The Conglomerate is up to something out there".

Third, the Conglomerate provides real-time advancement for changes in the world (which we've identified as something we all want). Players fail a mission? Well, now the slavers are stronger and move to enslave a friendly settlement, or have better gear next time, or they've allowed the Conglomerate to get closer to finding The Big Bad Thing. A key NPC is killed in a slavery raid. A resistance cell is captured and executed. An unguarded vault is locked down. Players beat a mission? Now they've freed an area of Conglomerate patrols, or endeared themselves to a particularly stubborn faction, or made their fights against Conglomerate guards easier. The frogmen village re-opens its doors. A huge beast no longer fears to patrol the skies. A mass exodus of freed slaves migrates across the area. And so on. It's like the Chaos Index in a few products - we can track changes to the region and spawn events based off how well the players thwart/are thwarted by the Conglomerate.

Four, because they are made up of individuals, members of the Conglomerate have potential to be bargained with, reasoned with, turncoat double-agent infiltration stuff. Alpha Squad hates Bravo Squad, so maybe the party dresses up as Bravo Squad and attacks them to get them to wipe each other out. Or maybe if they wipe out Bravo Squad, Alpha Squad is willing to negotiate for the release of an important slave, or turn a blind eye to the party entering a dig site, or give the party a bit of info on Charlie Squad, etc. My point is that there's room for two sides of faction play here: with the groups outside of the Conglomerate, and with the groups inside.

Anywhoo, if not the Conglomerate (and we can re-think the name, if that's the problem; "Empire of the Setting Sun", " Grand Confederation", " or some ironic name like "Hands of the Free People"), then we should at least consider the idea of the big bad faction that everyone rallies against, because it's so insanely versatile yet easy for player's to grasp.
 
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Grützi

Should be playing D&D instead
Good points DP and I agree with all of it.
I can work with the conglomerate. I only ask that it doesn't end up being a faceless corporation ... this isn't shadowrun ;)
 

The1True

My my my, we just loooove to hear ourselves don't we?
I'm obviously a big fan of the Conglomerate idea, but they definitely need a rename. Some kind of archaic synonym for Conglomerate/Corporation/Syndicate/Combine (that doesn't sound like the Dutch East Indies Trading Company...)
 

Commodore

*eyeroll*
These are excellent criticisms. Thanks

I think we could get a lot of millage of making some kind of high-altitude Frog people. Since I assume we are running with kind of Peruvian/Tibetan theme, there should be a few small lakes/ponds/marshlands where these guys could fit in perfectly. After reading a few articles about them, it would be easy to separate them from regular old Bullywugs, while still using mostly the same stat block if we wanted.



Basically, they would have translucent skin with green or blue bones and not croak. they would live in and around high altitude lakes (birth pools). They could have poisonous skin. Their natural enemies could be fungus men.

They could raise giant flies/mosquito in some kind of weird insect-farm and (maybe) ride on giant cockroaches (this one is pretty silly, imho.)

Culturally, their holy people have some kind of weird philosophy about the different stages of life (egg, tadpole, frog, death) and how that relates to the universe. Their god could be a frog sticking a tongue up his ass, symbolizing the circle of life (this is silly again).

Tibetans believe that the lakes in the Tibetan plateau are sacred and avoid fishing them. If we imported that believe into whatever human culture is going to populate this hex crawl, that could explain why these Frogmen continue to exist.

Also, maybe if you smoked the frogmen's skin you could have some sort of psychedelic effect. Maybe one of the less scrupulous human cultures in the area wants frogman pelts so they can get high out of their mind (and worship some kind of psychedelic deity or something).

Just brain-storming, let me know what you think. I won't take it personally. Also feel free to springboard off of this.
I love this; these are reskinned Grippli, aren't they? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grippli
MONSTER CARDS is pretty darned old school for a monster source.
 

DangerousPuhson

Should be playing D&D instead
I'm obviously a big fan of the Conglomerate idea, but they definitely need a rename. Some kind of archaic synonym for Conglomerate/Corporation/Syndicate/Combine (that doesn't sound like the Dutch East Indies Trading Company...)
I'm thinking two names for the conglomerate: what they call themselves (their real name), and what the Exiles call them.

Vote for favourites. Cast more than one vote to allow overlapping. Also feel free to throw in your own suggestions.

Their own/real name ideas:
- The Order of Frontiersmen
- The Brotherhood of the Dead World
- Shadows-Into-Light
- The Royal Exploration Corps
- The Bloodrock Excavation Guild
- The 7th Battalion, Recovery Division
- The Grand Archaeologist Society
- The Great Revival Movement
- The Tenth Imperial Decree
- Jake's Friendly Dig Company

Ideas for what the Exiles call them:
- The Taskmasters
- The Snatchers
- The Great Enslavement
- The Thousand Overlords
- The Overseers
- The Death Tide
- The Unfair Ones
- The Slavekeepers
- The Tyrants
- The Manacles
- The Last Punishment
 
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The1True

My my my, we just loooove to hear ourselves don't we?
Nice.
I like some form of Guild:
The Royal Expeditionary Guild
The Royal Exploration Guild
The Royal Excavation Guild
or just The Guild

and on the other side:
The Machine
The REGs
The Guild
The Takers (that sounds like a Planescape thing maybe?)
 
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