Running House D&D this Wednesday, or so I'm told. ("House D&D" being "Basic D&D with housemates and associates, including girlfriend-types and not specifically aimed at super grognards the way we usually roll around here".) Last time (the first time), we ran one session of the (banned) orange-cover version of B3 Palace of the Silver Princess (weirdness very much in - see HERE for details (UNLESS YOU'RE PLAYING AND THAT MEANS YOU, YOU SNEAKY ENGLISH K'NIGITS)). They spent most of the session getting there (jumping around city roofs and playing 007 before getting to the green dude with the hook), and then proceeded to make it a hundred feet or so in, blunder into a pit trap, and get their asses more or less handed to them by militaristic kobolds. Barely managing to force a failed morale check, driving the overly-effective dogmen away, the party limped back to the entrance, short a player character.

So now they're in need of warm bodies and an outfitter. (Besides the dead PC from last time, we may have one or two new players.) They're in poor shape for the "wander around until we inevitably run across imprisoned adventurers" thing, so that means travel. I'm loathe to handwave such things - sure, you can say "you get to town X with Y random encounters on the way", but I dig when things evolve a bit more organically. TO THE MAPPING CHAMBER.



I'm basing this on the overland map in (orange-cover) B3, sort-of-mostly shoehorned into the corresponding area from the Mystara map included in the D&D Rules Cyclopedia. Which is not to say I'm giving much if any weight to the Mystara stuff that's gone before - the material from B3 is pretty clearly out of line with what's been published for this area since, and I'm not a huge Mystara scholar anyway - but I figure I have the RC, and the pretty map pages in it, I may as well make use of it for the surrounding areas. Most of what I've done here is actually just North of the extreme Northwest corner of the RC Mystara map - which also means that the Western border of my map is "off the charts", even in the source material. So that's where I can get freaky-crazy - I'm envisioning a vast, weird steppes area populated by barbarians and giant animals (stolen from Judges Guild, natch), with a spice road across it and lots of "on the road" zaniness. With a nice, dangerous reputation to keep folks away from it before I've actually done any of the design work, of course. :D

With that context in mind, I spent some time mapping the locations and routes (roads, paths and rivers) from B3 onto my RC-based hex map. (Using the 5-mile Judges Guild scale for this.) (Yes I know it was supposed to be 15 miles, no I don't care.) Some map distortion crept in getting things to fit where I wanted them, but I managed to more or less preserve the distances between locations, so fuck it. From there, we have a pretty bare map. Time to flesh it out.

Using the "habitation" table from the AD&D DMG (pg. 173), I rolled the "chance of habitation" for every hex in a 15 x 15 hex area. Any weird results (assuming that the main towns were those on the map, and that there weren't a bunch of extra cities, for example) were massaged out (either moved somewhere useful, or ignored). Got a bunch of small thorps & hamlets, a ton of individual settlements / camps, and more than a few ruins. Using the "race of settlement ruler" table from Kellri's GDD#4, we find that there are a lot of displaced dwarven settlements in the area (presumably refugees from the Palace's fall) (used tons of Dwarf Fortress names for these, of course), and a couple of powerful retired adventurers living in the valley as well.

And here's where we're at (with water colored in, figuring not much there is gonna change or need erasing at this point):




With the terrain and main settlements arrived at, I have a pretty good basis to fill in the blanks with lots of results from the Judges Guild ruins & relics table, and then it's hexcrawl time. YEEAAAAAAAAHHHHHH

- DYA


Edit: I figured it'd be illuminating to include the map I based my work off of. So there.

School is very very crazy and gaming is pretty few and far between, lately, so I was psyched to have a chance to break out the Battletech stuff (for the first time in a loooong time) the other day. (Got two weeks off until it's back to Crazy Robots and Polygonland.) Introduced one of the roommates to tabletop BT - he's an old hand at the PC series, so most of it was already familiar. We did a pretty standard "attack/defend" scenario, just 'mechs (no combined arms stuff like tanks or infantry) and strictly 3025 designs (and level 1 rules). Today we'll probably do something similar, and then maybe we'll start working in the non-'mech stuff. I've always been curious how that mode of play goes - all my BT experience has been strictly 'mech-on-'mech.

So I'm reading the Mechwarrior book (the RPG chocolate to BT's boardgame/mini hybrid peanut butter), and there's discussion of running man-to-man combat using the standard Battletech maps (with a 5 meter to a hex scale). This looked lke fun, but it also occurs to me - why not use Battletech maps for other games where outdoor combat comes up a lot? I've never been a huge fan of wilderness layouts drawn on battlemats - visually it just doesn't work for me the way it does with dungeons - but I already own a big pile of hexed-out terrain sheets, with beautiful art no less. Next time I have occasion, I'm gonna whip out a few BT mapsheets and see how it flies. (The big decision: What scale to use (the hexes are a little bigger than the 1" I'm used to on my mat), and whether to bother restricting figures to the hexes, or to just use a ruler (a la traditional mini wargaming).

Of course this repurposing thing is nothing new - our learned and crusty readers will already be aware that Avalon Hill's Outdoor Survival map was the original wilderness map for Gary's home game. Has a nicely circular feel, this.

It occurs to me as well that AD&D inherited OD&D's outdoor scale of 1" to 10 YARDS (as opposed to feet, as it is in indoor settings like the dungeon), and off the top of my head I can't remember whether Classic D&D followed suit. (The next chance I'll likely get to use this is our still-fledgling house Red Box game - the guys (and gal) came out of the Palace of the Silver Princess with one less adventurer than they went in with, and are considering making the trek down out of the mountains into the valley below, in search of able sword-arms and a decent outfitter.)

This would be a great fit for Traveller, as well, especially if I ditch Trav's assumed scale - the old Snapshot ship maps are beeeeyootiful, but who the hell wants to track down 15mm sci-fi minis when most everything else I play is 28mm and up?

- DYA