Spriggan's Den

My Overland Travel Rules adapted for Dragonbane

Yeah, not a good title, but I think it gets the message across.

Always being annoyed with how all the editions of D&D have overland travel speed systems that don’t actually work with any hex map scale other than 1-mile hexes and make you calculate annoying fractions, I eventually had created my own system based on historical data that always would get the party move a full number of hexes in a day without any fractions of hexes as a remainder. I had it all worked out quite well, ignoring forced marches because those really mess things up by giving you additional hours to move.

The Dragonbane rules have greatly simplified forced marches by giving the party two quarters (shifts) of the day for normal travel, with the option to push ahead forba third quarter at the price of becoming exhausted. A third quarter means moving 1.5 times the normal daily distance. And after some considerations, I accepted that the best way to avoid introducing fractions again would be to simply switch from a 6-mile hex grid to a 3-mile hex grid. The old hexes per day become hexes per shift and the players can either move two or three shifts in a day.

I have a great fondness for 6-mile hexes, as it is kind of the established standard scale and has been for decades. But 3-mile hexes just work out so much neater in practice that it’s hard to justify not making that switch. Very fortunately for me, I’ve not yet created the giant wall sized 6-mile hex map for the sandbox I’m currently working on. Otherwise that change to 3-mile hexes would have really hurt.

For everyone’s convenience, here is the updated system for overland travel adjusted for 3-mile hexes and the Dragonbane shift system as tidy tables.

Overland Travel

Load	Easy	Difficult
Light	6	3
Medium	4	2
Heavy	2	1

This table assumes different levels of Encumbrance, which the Dragonbane rules don’t include by default, but I think are a very important aspect of resource management if that is meant to be a feature of the campaign. In a game without Encumbrance rules, just assume a Medium load for adventurers traveling with all their equipment.

Unlike the rules in nearly any RPG, common mounts like horses don’t actually move any faster over the course of a shift. Their ability to run much faster is entirely negated by their greater need for rest after doing so. But they can carry much greater loads of gear and supplies than a person at the same walking speeds, which makes them hugely valuable (if the game uses Encumbrance rules).

For simplicity, terrain can be either easy or difficult to get through. Make that judgement for whatever types of terrain your setting is using and what feels fitting for the style of your campaign.

River Travel

Current	Speed
Downriver, strong	6
Downriver, light	5
No current	4
Upriver, light	3
Upriver, strong	2

River travel might not seem particularly fast compared to someone walking with a light load, especially when going against the current. But as with mounts, a boat enables you to haul much larger loads of gear and supplies without being slowed down significantly. And while traveling on a river, you are also not affected by difficult terrain that cuts your travel speed by half.

Sea Travel

Wind	Speed
Favorable	12
Average	9
Unfavorable	6

These sea travel speeds are deliberately kept very simple because ships in the early medieval period my campaign is based on were very slow, and because my game will probably feature barely any naval action. I made this table simply for parties traveling between ports on a single stretch of coastline. For campaigns that feature ship chases and naval actions, the table should probably be expanded to different ship types and more differentiated wind conditions.

Lore 24

It’s now only three more weeks until the start of 2024, so it’s probably high time to get some promotion for this idea going.

I think most people in the DIYRPG space are familiar with Dungeon 23, the big project to write up one room for a big megadungeon every day for all of 2023. While it was hugely popular (at least on Mastodon) in January and February, coming up with a whole new dungeon room every day was a mighty ambitious plan. A few people seem to have made it nearly all the way to the end now, but most have dropped out long ago, and I heard from several other people that they also never started with it because the whole thing seemed just too big from the start.

A few weeks back, we had some conversations on Mastodon about doing something similar in 2024, but for worldbuilding on a campaign setting instead of rooms for a megadungeon.

The whole idea is fairly simple and straightforward:

Come up with a general concept for a new campaign setting or take any setting you already done some work on and want to expand upon.
For every day in 2024, write up a description of one thing that exists in that world. Could be a place, a creature, a spell, a character, an item, a deity, an event, or whatever you can think of.
The purpose of it all is to practice turning vague ideas in your mind into concrete words that can be shared with other people. The entry of the day should of course be something that you’ve written up on that day, but the idea that you’re describing does not necessarily have to be a completely new one. It can just as well be an old idea that you never got to properly put into words before.
The entry of the day can take any length or format. Could be as short as a post on Mastodon, or a full page description with stats for your game system of choice, or anything in between.

Personally, I see two main goals in doing something like this. One is that in my experience, ideas become much more concrete and real once you have put them into words, and with that it comes much easier to expand upon them and create connections between the different elements of the world. The other one is to simply share worldbuilding ideas with other people. Small snippets of things that you think are cool and that other people might use as ideas for new things in their own settings. The goal is not so much to have a complete setting finished at the end of the year that is ready to play in. There should be no commitment to treat any of the entries you write as an established fact of the world from that point onward. If at a later point you get ideas for things that would overwrite something you’ve written and shared before, I would not bother about that and just ignore any inconsistencies and conflicts between the entries. If at the end of the year (or even any earlier point) you end up with a big heap of spelled out ideas from which you’ll take only half or a third to use for the world of a future campaign, I would still consider that a huge success.

After some discussion, most people bouncing around ideas seem to be quite happy with using the name Lore 24 for this entire undertaking. It’s short, snappy, and makes for a good hashtag. Which is already being used on Mastodon. With this being a thing that is supposed to be done every day starting at day 1, it really would be great to spread the word about it now in advance as much as possible.

If this idea sounds fun and interesting to you, please do what you can to promote it. Feel free to link to this post if you want to.

Fun with Mapbashing, and perhaps a map for the new Kaendor

Maybe I should just make peace with being that map guy who keeps excitedly posting about new map doodles that I’ll mostly never be using for any campaigns?

I was, once again, feeling unhappy with the latest maps for Kaendor that I made over the last week since the coast lines look too square and there’s too many big blank areas that are just forest with no further detail. So I went looking again for very large maps of the natural geography of the Earth to see if I find any regions with an interesting topography that I could use as references. And I realized that a map of the world looks really weird and barely recognizable when you simply mirror it.

I really like that look (even with the heavy stretching at the poles) and think that this would make a great global map for Kaendor. Zooming in on East (now West) Asia, I noticed that the overall layout of the coastlines already has a very similar general arrangement and my various sketches for Kaendor maps have had for the last two years or so now.

Southeast Asia happens to be where I always placed the huge jungles of Kemesh where the remnants of the ancient naga empires are barely holding on. But making all the small seas between the Indonesian island into dry land (which was once the case), there’s now just precisely the vast jungles that I wanted in that place. The cool thing about this is that I can still use all the mountain ranges in that region as a fast method to have a perfectly plausible topography.

I also decided to greatly simplify the islands of the First Island Chain because I think those would stand out too obviously as being just a mirrored map of Asia. And it also will save me a lot of work with very fiddly details.

A map at the scale above is way too big for any practical uses in any single campaign, and even covering that area on a 30-mile hex map would be ridiculously huge. As a map for Kaendor, I already changed the scale to 75% the lengths of distances (which means 56% the total area), just so that I can fit more interesting squiggly coastlines on the cool A2, 30-mile hex sheets I made. For the Kaendor ’24 campaign, I instead want to focus just on the central area shown below. But having that large, zoomed out map with little detail at hand as a reference will surely come super handy when it comes to adding mentions about distant lands and peoples beyond the known world to the setting. And if at some point in the future I might want to fully map out some of those areas in the same higher detail, it will all already be geographically consistent with whatever mentions and references I had used before.

And this is the area that I plan to turn into a fully worked out 30-mile hex map. Having all the mountain ranges and rivers already in place, and being able to look up images of the real landscapes, really helps a lot with inspiring ideas to what details I could fill this map with. I even can look up climate data if I want to, though with the map now flipped, wind directions and the corresponding rain patterns would not match up perfectly. But I think the climate of Europa and East Asia happens to be similar enough that it doesn’t even bother this one geography mega-nerd who surely is the only person to pay a single thought to this.

I’m having a lot of fun with this, and I am feeling really good (though I always do that) about this maybe being the final geography layout for Kaendor. With the arrangement being so similar to what I already established about the geography in the past, it should be really easy to copy all the locations over on this map without much breaking.

“How to have a message” on civilizational conflict

I don’t usually post links to random videos here, but this is one I really want to share with more people:

The initial premise of “Avatar is stupid and Princess Mononoke is great” is pretty much a no brainer and what could possibly be added to that conversation? But after an initial overview and comparison of the two movies, which I think is actually really funny and entertaining, I started to wonder how he’s going to draw that one out for another half hour. Which is where the movie starts to broaden out and take off into a very unexpected direction and turns into one of the most interesting discussion about conflicts of this kind I’ve seen in a very long time.

I don’t think I’ve come across any new videos of this caliber (except Jacob Geller, of course) in several years. This is really good. I very much recommend giving it a listen.

10 Years of This

According to my first post, this page has been up for 10 years today.

Go, me!

Yeah, I don’t think there’s really anything profound to say about the occasion. When I decided to take a shot at setting up a site like this, they already had their greatest days behind them and the great buzz was quieting down. And while there might be a case for this kind of thing having fallen out of fashion, I actually think I’m having more readers now than I ever did before. At least going by the amount and quality of comments I’ve been getting over the last year.

I really wasn’t one of the old crowd and I think still somewhat feel like being that new guy who joined the party much later. But given that most of the oldest sites are also just 14 years old now, that difference has probably become pretty insignificant. I was thinking a while back how it seems that most of the original crowd have been gone by now, but when I checked all the sites I remember as being the big ones that everyone quoted and referred to regularly, it turned out that almost all of the sites are still up, and probably some 70% or more have had new posts in the last few year. But for a lot of them, this has become three or four posts per year. Which is a shame, as I really liked a lot of them. But that does give some context to me still doing some four to eight posts every months. And while I rarely think that I have something big and meaningful about RPGs to tell the world, I really don’t feel like I’m running out of stuff to share anytime soon.

I think putting a notification for every new post here on Mastodon has made a big difference for feeling that my stuff is getting more attention now than in used to be for most of the time I’ve been running this site. It’s something I’d recommend to anyone running a site like this. Or even is thinking about starting one. I’m still finding new ones that I never heard of before, and some are really good. This party nowhere getting near to being over.

And I think another 10 years from now, I’m probably still doing this.

Foundations of a new Kaendor

Having a blast with working on Kaendor and things really falling into place now, and feeling like doing one of my reference pile showoffs again.

Mentally I’m having the image “George Lucas and Jim Henson produced an AD&D movie in 1989, shot in the Sierra Nevada”.

This is quite a departure from the world of my previous campaigns and I feel it’s basically a new setting at this point. But it also is such a strong return to the original ideas that I had in mind when I created the name Kaendor that I want to keep using it anyway. This is now much closer to what I wanted to do all the way back before it ran away from me to turn into a more Conanesque Sword & Sorcery setting.

And looking back up to the cover of the Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting box again, I see why Forgotten Realms/Bloodborne feels like such a nice combination. Galadriel vs. Cthulhu will be the greatest shit ever!