Get up, breakfast, coffee, read some fediverse stuff, more coffee, and now I feel like bouncing around! boing! boing! boing!
I wanted to run just the dungeon, I really did. Just Stonehell, I told myself. But now I went ahead and generated a little wilderness using Hex Describe, started reading through the surrounding hexes, started writing a rumour table, and it’s starting to eat up my brain cycles. Why am I doing this?
Here’s why I should not be doing this. Stonehell has ten levels, with four quadrants each, and two surface quadrants, so 42 quadrants in total. Of these, the players have explored the two surface quadrants and the first quadrant of the first level. 17 short sessions and that’s all we did. Assuming we continue like that, there’s 39 quadrants left, so 39 ÷ 3 × 17 = 221 sessions remaining. Our first session was 2022-02-21, 176 days ago, so on average 176 days for 17 sessions is 10⅓ days per session. That means we have about 2288 days left to go, or a bit over six years.
And now I’m adding a wilderness to the mix. Gaaaah!
The first thing that needed to happen was that the bandit captain whose minions they defeated again and again needed to find a safe place on the map. Easily done.
Then I needed to find some dragons nearby and add them to the rumour table. Done!
Then I needed to write a random encounter table based on nearby monster lairs. Done!
Then I needed to add the important monsters from the nearby lairs (now also on the random encounter table) to the rumour table. Done!
What else?
I need to add famous wizards and elves to the rumour table so that the player spell casters know where to go to learn new spells. This is an effect of my conservative interpretation of the B/X spell acquisition rules: you need a live teacher to teach you new spells. No automatic spells upon gaining a level. No transcribing spells from spell books and scrolls. You need a live and willing teacher. My hope is that this motivates exploration and travel. But in order for this to work, of course, we need more stuff on the rumour table.
#RPG