We never seem to run these emergent narrative crawler type games the same way twice. And this time we decided we wanted a persistent town system. But after flipping through the rulebooks for Hexcrawl and Alone In The Shadows of Brimstone we decided that we wanted something simpler, with less overhead and additional systems.
We play with everything all at once when we do SoB (though I only have Forest of the Dead and thus Haunted Castle from Forbidden Fortress). So there’s already a lot going on. But we love the variety and not knowing what’s coming next. And if we want to theme something, I sort of just do it on the fly. Tossing threat cards that don’t fit and pulling the next. I sometimes play a bit of GM for my wife when it fits or inspiration strikes.
We’re not quite done with our starting party because we like to set up individual backstories & goals for our characters. We’ve not done this yet, but we usually start with Ryan’s Campaign Modules for inspiration. And then build off of what we roll on his tables. We ran a game that had a prospector looking for his lost dog, and once found would sell all his belongings if he had to in order to get that pup resurrected. It also had a Frontier Doc with apocalyptic visions that led to XXL enemies potentially annihilating otherworlds or earth itself (as a fail state). And that gave the party an ultimate goal with rules we made for achieving victory. Sometimes these things add vulnerabilities or small rewards for characters.
We have selected heroes for this run and we’re going with a tribal party that includes a Dark Stone Shaman (who we’re fudging to be from Jargono), a Jargono Native, and then an Aztec Blood Priestess and Eagle Warrior that were displaced and had been living in Jargono with the other party members. But we’re going to start the game in the Old West because we’re not done using that as the starting point/base world.
So back to the question of persistent towns… I think we’ve come up with a pretty good system that doesn’t involve needing an overland map and still respects the normal rules for rolling on travel hazards dependent upon town sizes. As well as mission fail conditions that will damage towns.
We’re going to start with 3 towns pre-named and given a size, but nothing further until we visit them. They will count as “previously visited” for the chart below. Towns will use the frontier town rules plus the Hexcrawl traits (modified for my own preferences). And then the 3 forts shown in the map in the adventure book (which will be small towns with frontier outposts, defensive traits, single-night stays only, and limited building options like is done in the Alone in the SOB mod). Plus the conquistador camp should we choose to use it (Aztec chars unlock access).
Then we’re going to have a mission board that holds 5 missions at a time. I’ve got like 170 missions on a spreadsheet to roll on and determine what hits the mission board. Obviously there’ll be some re-rolls if we don’t want to interact with a particular otherworld yet or start in the middle of a quest chain, etc… We’re ok with doing that on the fly. And then each mission will have a randomized turn-in point. I’m not sure that I’m settled on the percent chances to roll each thing, but it’s currently looking like this:
Turn-In Chart
| 1 | Return to the Town Where You Pick This Up (wait to fill in destination) |
|---|---|
| 2 | Return to the Town Where You First Saw This Generated |
| 3-4 | New Town, roll a D3, 1 = small, 2 = medium, 3 = large |
| 5 | Roll a D3: 1 = Fort Burk, 2 = Fort Lopez, 3 = Fort Landy |
| 6 | Conquistador Camp (or any camp being used in your campaign) |
| 7-10 | A Randomly Selected Previously Visited Town |
But the idea here is that if a mission failure causes damage to a town, you already have decided which town you’ll be heading to after the mission, so can’t fudge the town that gets affected. And the town’s size will determine how many travel hazards you get as per usual (though you could choose to go elsewhere, I think). And we enjoyed the Ultimate Travel Hazards book so we’ll be using that again. But I may check out the hazards from Alone in the SOB.
I’m considering making large towns harder to get than small or medium though. I haven’t decided yet. But 20% chance that a mission will bring you to a new town seemed alright. And it could very well make you want to take a mission you’d otherwise skip just to get a new town.
We’re also thinking of connecting all railroad towns and river towns and you can travel from one to another for a ticket price.
And then I’m going to borrow a system for paying to initiate construction in towns with destroyed buildings. I think Hexcrawl has one.
But I just thought I’d share for anyone interested. It also helps me sort it all out in my mind by forcing me to explain it to people.
EDIT: Adding the map we’re going to fill in as we create towns in the OP too. Not using any sort of physical travel across it. Just for immersion’s sake (and based on the adventure book map).
