Target 20 (Variant) for Swords & Wizardry

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 replacement for to-hit charts when using descending AC in Swords & Wizardry.

S&W Target 20

When a player makes an attack roll, they add a bonus “to-hit” based on their character’s class and level, and add the target’s AC as an additional bonus. If the total is at least 20, the attack hits.

Let’s look at a pair of examples, using both systems:

Standard Rules: A 1^st-level fighter with a +1 strength bonus is attacking a kobold with an AC 7[12]. According to the attack table on page 38 of Swords & Wizardry complete, the fighter needs a 12 to hit. The player rolls an 11 and adds their +1 strength bonus, bringing the total to 12. A hit!

Target 20: A 1^st-level fighter under this system gains a +1 “to-hit” bonus based on class and level (see below). They also gain the +1 strength bonus as above. The player once again rolls an 11 and adds +2 (+1 class bonus, +1 strength bonus), for a total of 13. The player also adds the kobold’s descending AC of 7, for a total of 20. Since the total is at least 20, it’s also a hit.

Note that either player would have missed had they rolled a 10 or less. In other words, the math between the two systems is identical.

Full Rules

Here's the full rules, including Target 20 to-hit bonuses for all PC classes, as a one-page document and as a version that's the perfect size to print out as a bookmark.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Random Realm: Final Touches to Base Map

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. For gaming purposes, I think we can follow this route as well. To find the major water features, we again turn to our original cropped DF map.

Those blue curvy lines inside the continent represent major rivers. The blue ~ symbols are lakes. When drawing in my own rivers and lakes, I tried to keep them to the general areas and shapes presented in that map, but I wasn’t slavishly devoted to their exact placement. I also tried to make my rivers flow as rivers do in real life: downhill. Dwarf Fortress will already have taken that into account, of course, but the exact flow of those ASCII rivers isn’t exactly the most clear thing on that map, and so I had to make some decisions as I went.

 

Here is my map with all water features drawn in and highlighted in white (for greater visibility).

 

 

One final note about this image: The image above involves a lot of small tweaks in GIMP to clean up mistakes, color in tiles that were split between two hex colors, etc. I duplicated the main hex layer and changed the mode to "Multiply". I then darkened it a bit via contrast / brightness. Then I merged that layer down so I could color in the mismatched coastal hexes. I also corrected a problem where the automatic coast generation made some land tiles into water, opening up what should be a closed sea / bay on the west side of the map.

I also added a compass rose.

Up Next

Adding Settlements (and maybe some actual RPG content)

Random Realm: Trimming the Map

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&D, but I’m reasonably confident that I don’t want to run something with a lot of deserts.

 

 

 

Step 5: Convert to a Hex Map

I really like the look of the pretty map that the GIMP plugin created, but I find hex maps more useful on the GM side of the screen. My goal is to ultimately produce two maps: a graphically appealing fantasy map and a useful hex map.

To make a campaign hex map, I’m turning to yet another piece of software: Worldographer. One nice feature of this program is that it lets you drop an existing map onto a background layer to help decide where to place hexes representing the predominate terrain.

For that purpose, the original Dwarf Fortress ASCII map is actually a little more useful, because each of those ASCII symbols roughly translates into a specific type of terrain, which can in turn be represented by a single hex. The DF map, when cropped identically to the prettier map and dropped onto the Trace Underlay layer of Worldographer, looks like this:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After I add hexes for Terrain, the map looks something like this:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Next Steps

I’ll need to add more realistic coasts, terrain features like rivers, and make general improvements and tweaks to the campaign hex map.

Random Realm: Initial Map

In a previous post, I mentioned the idea of using Dwarf Fortress to create a more realistic campaign map. As an experiment, I'm going to do exactly that and see how well it works in actual practice.

Now, bear in mind I have no idea how to play Dwarf Fortress. The game has gotten some considerable buzz lately, having just released on Steam after some 20 years of development. My son is a big fan of the game, so he helped me tweak some of the settings I used in this experiment. Here’s the first few steps of how I turned a DF map into a map for a tabletop RPG.

Step 1: Create a Dwarf Fortress Map

Remember, the strength of Dwarf Fortress is that it creates a fairly realistic world, at least so far as taking into account things like river flow, water tables, rainfall, etc. I feel like pretty much anyone with a little bit of knowledge is better at that sort of thing than I am. And a computer is going to be infinitely better yet. While I’m sure Dwarf Fortress is far from perfect, it’s close enough to perfect for my purposes.

However, these maps aren't pretty:

Prior to its Steam Release, Dwarf Fortress has always relied on ASCII graphics. The idea is that the game’s designers used the simple graphics as a placeholder so they could focus on getting the simulation down, rather than worrying about visuals. Later, they’d add in some real graphics, once the engine powering the game was done to their liking. The fact that this took 20 years is beside the point.

Step 2: Making Things Pretty(ish)

While that map might be really useful in a game of Dwarf Fortress, there’s no chance I’m handing a map full of ASCII symbols to a group of players at my D&D game. Fortunately, someone else has already done the legwork of turning a finished DF map into something a little more pleasing to look at, in the form of a free plugin for GIMP. After a little bit of trial and error, I was able to transform the map above into this:

 

Step 3: Applying a Hex Overlay

For all it’s simulation, Dwarf Fortress doesn’t really use a consistent scale for its maps. It doesn’t really need to, as the game doesn’t require realistic scale in order to function. Tabletop RPGs, however, do require some sort of scale, if only to handle things like overland travel. I find hex maps really useful for this, so I’m going to pick an arbitrary scale and drop a hexagon overlay on my map that matches that scale.

To create this map, I followed the steps found here. Note that the size of these hexes is arbitrary. Assuming each hex is 24 miles across, this final map represents about 250,948 square miles. For comparison, the UK is 94,000 square miles, while Europe is 4 million square miles. That puts our setting a little on the small side, realistically, but certainly big enough for many years of adventures.

Bonus

Here's a screencap of the steps I used to create that hex effect in GIMP, just in case the link above ever dies.

Random Realm: Post 0

Over the past few days, I’ve started an experiment to create a small RPG Campaign setting map using Dwarf Fortress, GIMP, and Worldographer. I thought it might be interesting to chronicle the steps I took while doing this, so I dusted off my ancient blog and started posting them here. As to how far I’ll get, or whether I’ll end up doing anything at all with this experiment remains to be seen. For now, I’m going to keep messing around with this campaign setting until I get bored with the idea. As long as I do so, I’ll record the results on this blog.

The Challenge of Creating Realistic Maps

Here’s a thing I suck at: making RPG Maps. Not the drawing or the layout, but trying to make a map that is geographically and scientifically "realistic". At least, realistic enough not to shatter verisimilitude of any player smarter at this sort of thing than I am.

I tend to overthink these things. How do mountains affect rainfall? And what the heck is the “lake effect”? How many miles wide should a peninsula be? I don’t know, I’m afraid I will get it wrong, and it paralyzes me. So I get stuck before I even really start.

My advice to anyone else, and the truth I know in my head, is that none of that really matters. The vast majority of these things I start don’t get seen by anyone but me, anyway. And geography only matters in an RPG game if it's so bad as to be noticeable. In other words, on the way to battle the monsters in the borderlands, a river that flows uphill might, in fact, derail the whole adventure (unless it's on purpose and a wizard did it).

But, crippling perfectionism being what it is, I still look for ways past the hurdle. Something better than just ignoring it.

Real World Maps 

Maps are Key...right?

One way is to use a real world map. With Google Maps or Google Earth, one could just zoom in on a particular region of the world, do a screen capture, apply a hex overlay, and voila! Instant, realistic campaign map.

Supposedly, Greyhawk began as an altered map of the real world. Greyhawk was Chicago, apparently. The Near Dyv is shaped like Lake Superior. The main drawback to this is that I don't necessarily want to create fantasy Maine or whatever. And I'd feel compelled to do so. Why base my map on Germany if I'm not going to incorporate that somehow into the setting? Wouldn't a map based on Texas feel like it should have some sort of gunslingers or the like?

Computer Simulation

Another way around this issue is to use some kind of computer simulation to do the work for you. Dwarf Fortress, for example, is a deeply simulationist computer game (perhaps a ridiculously simulationist computer game) that generates a world map that takes into account things like rainshadow, water flow, and temperature. I don’t know how realistic any of this is. But I do know that Dwarf Fortress is smarter than me at this sort of thing. So I’m going to use it to create a campaign map.

To what end, I'm not sure. But I think I'm going to blog about it a bit. No promises, but it might be fun to make a little setting out of all this and see where it goes.