Retreat Forward

“Once you’ve set down the population centers, you can begin placing the Ruins locations. These Ruins represent lost cities, crumbled fortresses, stygian dungeon, plundered temples, abandoned towers of wizardry, and all the other decaying locales so beloved of adventurers.” -- An Echo Resounding: A Sourcebook for Lordship and War Kevin Crawford (2012) Step 11: Add Ruins In our last installment, we added two major cities to our random map as well as a handful of towns. Now we’re going to place some potential adventure locations in the form of what Crawford calls “Ruins.” The book suggests the following: 5 ruins for every City. 1-3 of those were once major human cities, towns, etc. The rest can be whatever (wizards' towers, lost temples, ancient ruins, etc.) Since we placed 2 Cities in a previous step, we need to place about 10 Ruins. According to Echoes, 2-6 of these should be former human settlements of some kind. I’m trying to lean into random...

Now that we have most of our natural features established on our map and we’ve taken stock of the scale and overall size of the campaign area, we need to add some settlements. Dwarf Fortress is no longer any help to us, as the starting map it generated didn’t contain any cities or settlements. Note that the program could have generated a whole civilization for us, complete with history and such. However, the result wouldn’t have been very useful for our needs. Anything produced by Dwarf Fortress ends up being pretty specific to the nuances of that game and its setting. It would be helpful to have some kind of guidance going forward, however. For that help, I’m turning to the first of our specific tabletop-related resources: An Echo Resounding , by Kevin Crawford. While partially a book on domain management and mass combat written for Labyrinth Lord , Echo also contains great guidance on building a D&D-style campaign using a sort of top-down approach, which is what we're intere...

WThis post is part of a continuing project to turn a map generated via the PC game Dwarf Fortress into a usable map for an RPG Campaign. At this point, we have a nice-looking hex map fleshed out with terrain and natural features. I wanted to take a break to look at what setting details we have so far. Setting Details At this point, we haven’t determined much about our setting. However, we do have SOME detail established. Before we move on to adding settlements, let’s take stock of what we know about our campaign   Terrain Our map includes hexes that correspond with the following types of terrain: Mountains Forest, Evergreen Forest, Deciduous Savanna Shrubland Badlands Grassland Scale and Terrain We also know a little bit about the area of our campaign and the map itself. Hex Size: I build this using a 6-mile hex scale. Number of Hexes: 30 hexes wide X 26 hexes high. Total Area: 24,180 miles. The math here is 1 hex = 31 miles, 780 hexes (30 x 26), 780 * 31 = 24,...

This post is inspired by my current Swords & Wizardry campaign. One of the features of Swords & Wizardry Complete is that it features both the traditional descending Armor Class of pre-2000 D&D as well as the more modern, ascending armor class of 3E and subsequent editions. This allows a S&W GM to choose whichever system they want to use in their home campaign. I’d like to offer a third variant, one that uses classical descending AC without having to rely on to-hit tables: Swords & Wizardry Target 20. First introduced by Delta’s D&D Hotspot , Target 20 is a means to replace attack charts with an easy-to-remember system that uses math even an English major such as myself can easily do in my head. Delta explains the reasoning behind the system in a great blog post here (seriously, check it out, it’s worth reading). He uses Target 20 not just for attack rolls, but for saving throws and thief skills as well. For our purposes, we’re going to use it to as a repl...

Random Realm: Final Map Touches I’ve been working on converting a procedurally generated map (created via Dwarf Fortress) into an RPG campaign map. I’m just about ready to start adding actual gaming content to this map and using it to build a small RPG setting. But first, I needed to make some aesthetic improvements to the map. Step 6: Coasts and Outlines I used a built-in feature of Worldographer to automatically generate coastlines. Then, using GIMP, I outlined everything first in black, then in white, then finally in a lighter shade of grey.   Step 7: Add Rivers and Lakes At this point, the only features from the original cropped DF map missing on my Worldographer recreation were water features: lakes and rivers. Now, if you look at the prettier map I autogenerated from the DF map, you can see lots and lots of rivers, crisscrossing the land.   That’s pretty realistic, but most maps don’t show that level of detail, instead focusing only on major water features. ...

I previously showed how I turned a map generated in Dwarf Fortress into something usable in a tabletop RPG game. At 250,948 square miles, the map that resulted is about 2.6 times the size of the UK, which is too large for a starting campaign. For this portion, I’m going to work on trimming the map down to a more manageable size and making it useful for actual gaming. Step 4: Trim the Map(s) Trimming the map is as simple as zooming in on a particular portion and cropping out the rest. Since I used a 24-mile hex scale previously, I can keep things at the same scale here. I’m not resizing things, I’m just cropping. Here’s the cropped map: I chose this section based on the kind of terrain I thought would make for a fun campaign. I specifically wanted something temperate, with access to mountains, the sea, and not too many deserts. Deserts, to me, suggest a specific kind of campaign that’s different than standard D&D. Not to say that this will necessarily turn into bog-standard D...