Monday, May 30, 2011

Sandbox Preparation: Adventure Material, Basic Details...

Good Morning, All:

Continuing on with Adventure Material development, I have to take a look at the amount of material I will need to begin the campaign. In order to keep this a small project (this is, after all, about Minimal Sandbox Preparation), I elected to pursue a smaller area for development. Being a fan of Traveller, my first reaction was to go with a subsector map, a hex map that measures 8 columns across by 10 rows down. By putting Ashaba in the middle of the map, that basically gives me an area to play that covers about two-three days travel from the center (depending on direction). That should give me plenty of room for the initial explorations of the characters, and if this method turns out to be faster for me, I can easily develop adjacent subsector-sized regions as they are needed.

Despite the fact that we really only need to develop a few areas around the players' home base city of Ashaba, I used NBOS Software's free Inspiration Pad Pro to develop the contents for the hexes for the entire region. I did this to demonstrate the range and frequency of results that I got from the process, mostly as a way of field-testing the random chart I'd created. Here's my result set, replacing an Empty result in hex 0505 with Ashaba:

HexContents
0101Empty
0102Lair: Common Animal
0103Lair: Humanoid
0104Empty
0105Color
0106Empty
0107Site: Dungeon (1 level)
0108Settlement: Homestead or Plantation
0109Empty
0110Lair: Common Animal
0201Empty
0202Lair: Supernatural Creature
0203Empty
0204Empty
0205Settlement: Homestead or Plantation
0206Empty
0207Empty
0208Empty
0209Terrain Effect: Arcane
0210Empty
0301Empty
0302Empty
0303Empty
0304Color
0305Empty
0306Empty
0307Lair: Humanoid
0308Empty
0309Empty
0310Empty
0401Settlement: Homestead or Plantation
0402Lair: Supernatural Creature
0403Empty
0404Empty
0405Empty
0406Site: Dungeon (4 levels)
0407Empty
0408Empty
0409Empty
0410Terrain Effect: Divine
0501Empty
0502Empty
0503Lair: Supernatural Creature
0504Empty
0505Ashaba (Home Base)
0506Empty
0507Empty
0508Lair: Common Animal
0509Empty
0510Empty
0601Empty
0602Empty
0603Empty
0604Empty
0605Lair: Humanoid
0606Terrain Effect: Man-made
0607Empty
0608Color
0609Empty
0610Empty
0701Empty
0702Lair: Supernatural Creature
0703Empty
0704Empty
0705Settlement: Monastery or Shrine or Temple
0706Empty
0707Site: Tower (3 levels)
0708Color
0709Lair: Humanoid
0710Empty
0801Lair: Supernatural Creature
0802Empty
0803Lair: Common Animal
0804Site: Dungeon (5 levels)
0805Color
0806Color
0807Empty
0808Terrain Effect: Natural and Arcane
0809Site: Dungeon (1 level)
0810Empty

This gives me a short list of 33 entries that will need to be developed over the course of the campaign, assuming characters hit all of them.

Important Regional Locations
0102 Lair: Common Animal
0103 Lair: Humanoid
0105 Color
0107 Site: Dungeon (1 level)
0108 Settlement: Homestead or Plantation
0110 Lair: Common Animal
0202 Lair: Supernatural Creature
0205 Settlement: Homestead or Plantation
0209 Terrain Effect: Arcane
0304 Color
0307 Lair: Humanoid
0401 Settlement: Homestead or Plantation
0402 Lair: Supernatural Creature
0406 Site: Dungeon (4 levels)
0410 Terrain Effect: Divine
0503 Lair: Supernatural Creature
0505 Ashaba (Home Base)
0508 Lair: Common Animal
0605 Lair: Humanoid
0606 Terrain Effect: Man-made
0608 Color
0702 Lair: Supernatural Creature
0705 Settlement: Monastery or Shrine or Temple
0707 Site: Tower (3 levels)
0708 Color
0709 Lair: Humanoid
0801 Lair: Supernatural Creature
0803 Lair: Common Animal
0804 Site: Dungeon (5 levels)
0805 Color
0806 Color
0808 Terrain Effect: Natural and Arcane
0809 Site: Dungeon (1 level)

However, the locations that require Adventure Material before we can begin playing are those within a day's travel of Ashaba. That cuts the list down significantly:

Important Starting Locations
0304 Color
0406 Site: Dungeon (4 levels)
0503 Lair: Supernatural Creature
0505 Ashaba (Home Base)
0605 Lair: Humanoid
0606 Terrain Effect: Man-made
0705 Settlement: Monastery or Shrine or Temple

Not bad. It's not quite the distribution that we designed for, but such is the nature of random generation. The nice part is that we were fortunate to a sample of every category type in this selection. (Okay, truth be told, I swapped two of them out from just outside the two hex range around 0505 with hexes within the range, so that I could include an example of each hex category in the final results, but it was only a matter of shifting the content up or down one hex.) At a minimum, these are the hex locations that we'll need to develop. I will tackle these in my next post.

With Regards,
Flynn

4 comments:

Alan said...

Interesting - look forward to see what you come up with for these areas. Good to see someone doing a non-standard adventure region.

Alan said...

Do you have a copy of the ipt file to share?

Flynn said...

Here's a copy of the IPT file I created:
https://sites.google.com/site/flynnsfiles/my-gaming-files/ILF_HexContents.ipt?attredirects=0&d=1

Hope This Helps,
Flynn

Alan said...

Magic. Thanks