Review: Tome of Adventure Design

tl:dr; a creativity boosting tool for the long-haul DM.

Tome of Adventure Design arrived over the Christmas, something that had been on my radar for quite a bit. I had been keeping an eye out for it on this side of the Atlantic in vain so finally it needed to be ordered in. Minor ding in the cover but it got here.

What we get is about 500 pages, a tome as advertised of all sorts of inspirational ideas for setting up adventures. This is very much a DM's tool for long haul DM's.

It hast a nice clean style double column throughout any of the text bits and the rest, the vast majority of the book, is tables. Sometimes these are single column where the prompts expand a little, sometimes they are up to four plus the index columns on the page for where it's just single words.

Shiny TTRPG links #209

The blog fields are rich and provide a fine harvest of links! For more, see the previous list found here or you can check the RPG Blog Carnival or on Third Kingdom Games news roundup. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch End of Week links.

New School Revolution proposes Bring on the Discourse

A Knight at the Opera gives us Defeat, Not Death

Weeping Stag gives us Opera, Dungeons, and the Quantum Shark – Building a Dungeon From the Inside Out

Rise Up Comus continues Designing Dungeons with Chapter 5: Dungeon Checklist

Kontent Punch shares Encounter Building Technologies

False Machine gives us Chaos Goblins - VotE Remastered Development

Osraige Press shares Worldbuilding by Implication 3

1pagedungeons gives us Real Time as a Resource

Hexcrawl25 and Hex Kit

Returning to the challenge of juggling between scales of hexes and sub-hexes while bringing my Hexcrawl25 map to table, I switched to Hex Kit. I used the Classic, Fantasyland and Travelling Through Dangerous Scenery hex packs.

Azgaars was good for the 10 mile hex scale but now I wanted to get down to 2.5 mile hex scale. The main thing grinding my gears was getting things consistent between levels, marking in the terrain and all that. To start off with I created a layer and just drew in some hexes to help with orientation. THe gray ones are sub-hexes shared between two macro-hexes. Sub-hex A1 is outlined for orientation.

The chunk of the map I am trying to work up is the centre of this hex grid; hexes A1-A7.

Folk Knowledge of Minor Planar Ways (RPG Blog Carnival)

This months blog carnival from VDonnut Valley has the topic of Other, Between, and Under – The Worlds Beyond - which matches to some ruminations I have been having on minor planar paths.

The key aspect of the minor planar ways is harmony or coherence - when the natural world has conditions that are coherent with whatever planar other-where, a thinness forms and a path can be traversed.

The minor planar ways are long known to the ordinary folk of the realm - people know how to get there, people know the hazards and people know that by far and away these are ways to be treated with caution and respect. For the most part, foot, barge or faithful donkey is far more predictable and reasonable and so most folk stick with those.

Shiny TTRPG links #208

Delightful links for our shared enlightenment! For more, see the previous list found here or you can check the RPG Blog Carnival or on Third Kingdom Games news roundup. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch End of Week links.

New Tabletop Adventure Games Discourse Forum

Jeremiah Robert McCoy shares Exploring Exploration

blark blog gives us DRATS! The Single Roll Encounter

dailyadventureprompts writes DM Advice: Ghosts on the Horizon

Martin McKenna on his Flickr page shares Games Workshop original drawings

Monsters and Manuals gives us Distance and Vastness in Hexmaps

Richard's Dystopian Pokeverse gave us A city is not a dungeon

Hexcrawl25 and Azgaar's Fantasy Map Generator

tl:dr; Azgaars Fantasy Map Generator is a good tool to get your broad strokes regions - your hexes - for you to then fill in your sub-hexes.

I set out to do Hexcrawl25 and made some poor decisions. Happily, these have revealed themselves in the first half of January rather than mid-year. I chose to scale up, which was a poor choice, revealed upon actual contact with a table, and so I have adjusted to scale down.

For... reasons I can no-longer recall, all my work on my campaign world so far is mapped with 10 mile hexes. This is not *entirely* useless but it is not great. I have done too much work with things at 10 mile to start changing things now - the campaign map for my home campaign is in 10 mile hexes, I am committed at this point. I used the following settings in Azgaar to get this; in the Style tab, selected the Grid element and set the scale to 0.1333 for 10 mile hexes.

I previously figured since the challenge was 24 mile / 6 mile, I would scale up to 40 mile / 10 mile - which you can see in the images below. Since taking this to table, I realise I have massively overshot and instead will be going 10 mile / 2.5 mile; our adventures will now take place in what would be hex A below and all those 10-mile sub-hexes within it are going to get broken down into 2.5 mile hexe.

I am happy enough with 2.5 mile hexes as close enough to the 3mile hex that is what you can walk in an hour and how far you can see. What is interesting is that zooming down that direction knocks out lots of the big regional shifts in religion/culture/nations.

I grabbed screen-shots of my Azgaars for the area I wanted with a bit of care - fullscreen, overlaid exactly - then fiddled with the full region template until it all lined up. I did this all in powerpoint and then just pushed and pulled different layers forward and back. This is clumsy as hell compared to layer manipulation in a dedicated photo editor but good enough to get by.

Actual test: hexcrawl mechanics (launch session)

Launched a new campaign, trying to bring hex-crawling to my open tables; I thought I would write it up from a deployment of actual hexcrawling mechanics to see how/if this type of play mechanically differed from 'standard 5e with a map'.

Session log with a mechanics focus