More nonstandard wilderness rules

More hexcrawl confusion from TSR can be found in I5 The Lost Tomb of Martek. 

Wilderness hexes are 2 miles. 

The module rules: 12" movement rate = 1 hex per hour.  Only 10 hours of movement per day.

Unpacking that, you get 10 hexes of movement per day, which is 20 miles. 

B/X rules that a 12" movement rate should yield 24 miles per day,  but desert travel is only 2/3 of that, yielding a 16 mile travel day.

Random encounters, in I5, are checked every four hours, which sounds like 6 checks per day. That is significantly more frequent than my reading of the rules. We're I play testing this module, I would have asked Hickman if this was necessary. 

Now, Hickman's module rules are not far off from the canonical rules, but why bother writing new rules at all? Standardizing wilderness rules makes it far easier for experienced GMs to use the work. I feel the hobby is still groping toward this kind of standardization.

Does this mean every module must follow the standard rules? Of course not. However, rule deviations should be used only when there is a compelling design motivation to do so.

Visualizing distance in your fantasy wilderness

[This is post a cross-post from G+, since I hope it will be of use to others in the future.]

Figuring out wilderness map scales is tricky -- particularly so for hexcrawls. In fiction, characters move at the speed of plot, but in RPGs and wargaming, better precision is needed.

So, use the real world to help you visualize distances that you are already familiar with. That may help you understand how your wilderness map should look.

PROTIP: Google maps is a great tool for this exercise.

Recall that wilderness hexes in B/X "default" to 24 miles. That's because it aligns with PC movement rates well. An unencumbered PC travels one hex per day.

But a map scaled out to 24 mile hexes loses a lot of detail.

A more useful hex size, at least for hex crawling, is 6 mile hexes.

Above is a map of my beloved Bay State. The google map scale here is 5 miles per inch (there is no 6 mile zoom option). Each square is an inch (I could not get any hex grip plugins to work on gimp tonight).

That gives us roughly a 4 square per day movement rate.

As the crow flies, I live about 5 squares away from Boston. Were I a PC, it would take me some part of two days to get to Beantown, if I met with no encounters. A traveler from Boston would need a full two days to get to Worcester (not shown, but east of the map). Hyannis (a town roughly in the middle of Cape Cod) is about 3 days travel. New York City (43 squares)? About 11 days travel (actually 12, since the rules say that PCs travel for 6 days, but must rest on the 7th).

Try this exercise with a location familiar to you. I hope this makes sense and helps make your wilderness maps even awesomer, although I already see a lot of sweet, sweet maps in the OSR community.



Guide: How to Hexcrawl

You have heard of hexcrawls, those wilderness adventures described in the expert ruleset of the world's most popular fantasy roleplaying game, but you probably aren't quite sure how to run them. You are in great company.

But now, there's help from Taskboy Games:

How to Hexcrawl

This Labyrinth Lord supplemental breaks down exactly what the referee needs, what the players can do and how each game day of the journey should be resolve in easy to follow, bullet point style.

How to Hexcrawl is available now through RPGNow.com.

Request for comments: How to Hexcrawl

Hexcrawling, that style of RPG play in which the players trek overland for many miles, is a tradition going back to the earliest days of the hobby. However, when I read the rules governing wilderness adventures in Cook's 1981 Expert ruleset, I could figure out how this actually was supposed to work at the game table.

Dan Proctor's Labyrinth Lord retro-clone of these B/X rules does a better job of presenting the material, but still fails to deliver a set of concise instructions on how a DM would run this type of adventure.

I have taken a stab at this.

How to Hexcrawl

This document outlines how to setup and run a hexcrawl using the standard LL rules. I approached the organization of this document as if I were writing rules for a board game to reduce ambiguity.

Right now, this document is in a "public beta" phase, where you can make comments directly on the document about anything you'd like. In a few days, I will close the beta and publish a free PDF of this content on RPGNow. All of the content therein is OGL and will always be free.

Go get your trek on.