Interesting approach. Using hexes for a city crawl has some of the benefits of wilderness hex crawling - use a d6 to determine direction, not locked into a square grid as with graph paper (useful since most ancient and medieval cities were not laid out in a grid, the Romans being the main exception). The hex can be limiting for cities though depending on how you lay yours out; I'd be inclined to do a city as a pointcrawl instead as described in a post series on the Hill Cantons blog: http://hillcantons.blogspot.com/2014/11/pointcrawl-series-index.html
I may have to resort to this kind of system for towns - not only for Portown. ;) I have city/town/village maps for my current campaign, but I don't have locations noted for any but the smallest of the villages (also the PC's home-base). Overlaying a hex grid over the existing maps may provide a way to "hexcrawl" a town, as the PCs attempt to find the location they seek. This would also aid me in noting locations in a key for that map as we proceed through the campaign.
The pointcrawl is something I was vaguely aware of for awhile now, but something I never paid much attention to because of time and priority. But now that I've finally skimmed kris katulik's posts, I can definitely use this to plan future scenarios for the campaign, writing stuff up as needed or beforehand if its a path the players are likely to take.
I don't know if this approach would completely work for an open sandbox campaign, where the players are allowed to go anywhere "off script", but as far as completing a scenario once started - I can't think of any scenario that doesn't have a villainous time-table, or leave a trail that the PCs must follow - so the pointcrawl would definitely work for events and following a trail of breadcrumbs to get to the next scenario or encounter.
Point crawls, like a lot of designs, can be used in different ways. The more railroady version would be an adventure that moves PCs from node to node in a more or less linear fashion - first A, then B, then C; or a mostly linear fashion but with options - so first A, then either B or C, but eventually ending at D.
A sandboxy approach is probably best visualized as similar to a Traveller subsector map.. in a subsector map, you can think of each system as an adventure node, and jumps as links in a node map creating a system which is effectively a point crawl sandbox (ie. you can move from any node to any linked node in any order, and have any adventures available at that node with no predetermined path or linkages beyond the jump routes themselves). In a fantasy city context, instead of jumping from system to system in a starship you'd be "jumping" from neighborhood to neighborhood. Kutalik's modules "Fever Dreaming Marlinko" and "Slumbering Ursine Dunes" make good use of these concepts and are well worth checking out - not just for the great content, but from a location-based adventure design perspective.
I like this. Procedural Urban Crawling via Landmarks is something I've wanted to see for a long time. I've considered using Voronoi Diagrams instead of Hexes for a more "organic" and unpredictable district/neighborhood feel. http://www.raymondhill.net/voronoi/rhill-voronoi.html.
Another thing I toyed with was defining neighborhoods/areas in a city by smell, so that location could almost be telegraphed to attentive players. Here are some smells I put together for this (these were for Yoon Suin, but are broadly applicable): drive.google.com - Table 2 - Three Hundred Smells of Yoon Suin.pdf - Google Drive
Interesting approach. Using hexes for a city crawl has some of the benefits of wilderness hex crawling - use a d6 to determine direction, not locked into a square grid as with graph paper (useful since most ancient and medieval cities were not laid out in a grid, the Romans being the main exception). The hex can be limiting for cities though depending on how you lay yours out; I'd be inclined to do a city as a pointcrawl instead as described in a post series on the Hill Cantons blog: http://hillcantons.blogspot.com/2014/11/pointcrawl-series-index.html
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ReplyDeleteI may have to resort to this kind of system for towns - not only for Portown. ;) I have city/town/village maps for my current campaign, but I don't have locations noted for any but the smallest of the villages (also the PC's home-base). Overlaying a hex grid over the existing maps may provide a way to "hexcrawl" a town, as the PCs attempt to find the location they seek. This would also aid me in noting locations in a key for that map as we proceed through the campaign.
ReplyDeleteThe pointcrawl is something I was vaguely aware of for awhile now, but something I never paid much attention to because of time and priority. But now that I've finally skimmed kris katulik's posts, I can definitely use this to plan future scenarios for the campaign, writing stuff up as needed or beforehand if its a path the players are likely to take.
I don't know if this approach would completely work for an open sandbox campaign, where the players are allowed to go anywhere "off script", but as far as completing a scenario once started - I can't think of any scenario that doesn't have a villainous time-table, or leave a trail that the PCs must follow - so the pointcrawl would definitely work for events and following a trail of breadcrumbs to get to the next scenario or encounter.
Point crawls, like a lot of designs, can be used in different ways. The more railroady version would be an adventure that moves PCs from node to node in a more or less linear fashion - first A, then B, then C; or a mostly linear fashion but with options - so first A, then either B or C, but eventually ending at D.
ReplyDeleteA sandboxy approach is probably best visualized as similar to a Traveller subsector map.. in a subsector map, you can think of each system as an adventure node, and jumps as links in a node map creating a system which is effectively a point crawl sandbox (ie. you can move from any node to any linked node in any order, and have any adventures available at that node with no predetermined path or linkages beyond the jump routes themselves). In a fantasy city context, instead of jumping from system to system in a starship you'd be "jumping" from neighborhood to neighborhood. Kutalik's modules "Fever Dreaming Marlinko" and "Slumbering Ursine Dunes" make good use of these concepts and are well worth checking out - not just for the great content, but from a location-based adventure design perspective.
I like this. Procedural Urban Crawling via Landmarks is something I've wanted to see for a long time. I've considered using Voronoi Diagrams instead of Hexes for a more "organic" and unpredictable district/neighborhood feel. http://www.raymondhill.net/voronoi/rhill-voronoi.html.
ReplyDeleteAnother thing I toyed with was defining neighborhoods/areas in a city by smell, so that location could almost be telegraphed to attentive players. Here are some smells I put together for this (these were for Yoon Suin, but are broadly applicable):
drive.google.com - Table 2 - Three Hundred Smells of Yoon Suin.pdf - Google Drive
Nice. Smell ya later!
ReplyDelete