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"This is Good" - Yochai Gal
UPDATE: This post is now a series.
1. Intro and Settlements (this post)
3. Stocking a Settlement & Surrounding Locations
Appendix B: Drifters: a rules set for the weird west (forthcoming)
Appendix C: The Weird: Magic, Clerics and Spirit-channelers oh my! (forthcoming)
How to Make a Caravan Crawl
So, I have a real love-hate relationship with Ultraviolet Grasslands. The art is out of this world. The rules are phenomenal where there are rules, though if you look at them as a whole they've got more holes in them than Swiss cheese. The setting is also so so evocative, but similarly, it feels incredibly unfinished, and lacks a core component that I appreciate in games, which is directionality and stickiness.
What I mean is that my players could walk into THE DEATH FACING PASSAGE or go visit THE NEAR MOON and while I love the vibes of that, I think after experiencing a really cool description, their reaction will be, "Okay, but what do we do now?" It's a bunch of really cool things with very little direction between them, and I think the expectation is that my players would be content just wandering from cool thing to cool thing, but that's just not how my players enjoy playing.
They want to figure out what is going on, then get into a crazy scheme to do something in the world, and then either pull it off or die trying. My hope is my game worlds almost reel the players into that scheming engagement, in the same way that incredible adventures / settings are always pointing players to other parts of the adventure, leading them to engage with it further. UVG fails to do this in my experience.
However, the framework of a Caravan Crawl has really stuck with me as a compelling alternative to a hexcrawl or pointcrawl. To be fair, a Caravan Crawl is sort of just a pointcrawl with an additional "level"- travel that takes a number of weeks rather than taking a number of hours. But, there's something interesting about the idea of a number of settlements separated by weeks, that themselves have both a central area as well as interesting locations in the surrounding geography.
So, I want to make my own Caravan Crawl, and I want to keep the same dynamics that the Caravan Crawl introduces, but I also want to make directionality a core component of the design of the region. And I want to do it in a setting very different from the psychedelic post-apocalypse of UVG. So, I'm in the midst of designing a weird western caravan crawl, and wanted to share the procedures I came up with for doing it. Hope you enjoy!
HOW TO MAKE YOUR OWN Caravan Crawl: Settlements
Get an 8.5x11 piece of a paper, and drop d6+3 dice (doesn’t matter the value) on it. If any fall off the page, you may discard them or reroll them. Ignore the value rolled, and mark where the dice landed. Each dice marks a settlement.
Roads
Roll for connections between each settlement. d6; 1-2 no path 3-5 trail 6 paved road. Assign distances. It takes 1 week to travel the length of your pinkie on a paved road, 10 days to travel that distance on a trail, or 14 days through the wilderness without a path. If connections cross where there isn’t a settlement, treat it as its own location, but populate as you would a Nearby Location. Just an inn, or a monument is enough.
Description:
For each settlement, roll on each column to describe it.
Defining the Settlements
Each settlement has d2 resources in excess and d2 resources in need. Excess resources are generally cheaper and higher quality, while needed resources fetch a higher price, as local supply is less than demand. You may choose your own, or roll on the table below.
Cities
Based on the above descriptors, designate d4-2 of these as cities; the rest are smaller towns.
I think it will be D & E. I like the contrast of new and old.
At some point, label the biome(s) of this area. If unsure, roll d4 for number of biomes, then d6 1 desert 2 grasslands 3 mountains 4 swamp 5 steppe 6 forest
Didn't feel the need to roll for this.
A&E have water, so they get wet grasslands.
F is sandy, so desert.
C & D both want ice, so I assume its toasty. Hence, dry grasslands.
B has ice, so snow covered mountains fits.
See the next post to add factions!!
1. The Procedures Alone (This Post)
3. Stocking a Settlement & Surrounding Locations
Appendix B: Drifters: a rules set for the weird west (forthcoming)
Appendix C: The Weird: Magic, Clerics and Spirit-channelers oh my! (forthcoming)
Great post! I've been looking for a procedure like this for a while
ReplyDeleteThanks for saying it! I plan to expand this, with a full list of d66 troubles, and series showing how I would do all of the above, similar to the wonderful designing dungeons over at Rise Up Comus!
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