Messing around with preparing for a new hexcrawl campaign and I am - as you do - home brewing rules to match. The working title is Ragged Brew for the rules and... well, I haven't picked a name for the hexcrawl campaign yet.
Based on past experience, the hardest part is going to be to strike the right balance between sticking to the rules in the book (I'm using OSE as my base) and starting play on one hand, and home brewing everything over and over again to get it just right, but never getting to actually play.
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| Sometimes you end up thinking about playing the game more than actually playing it. (Morris Meredith Williams) |
Maybe this time will be different? We'll see. But I'll start by stating a few broad stroke things I'd like from my home brewing effort:
Crawl through both settled lands and wilderness.
IMO there's plenty of potentially interesting shenanigans to get up to in "civilized" areas. Politics, romance, vengeance, social positioning and all the other things that generate conflict and stories often happen in the places where there are lots of people together.
Additionally, in RealLife (tm), most "unsettled" lands have people living in them (unless they are truly marginal or have been depopulated for whatever reasons), and I'm not super into the idea of just saying they're all monsters and thus can be killed. And that means I need the "civilized" rules for the wilderness as well.
Mainly, I think, it means that I'll have about an equal amount of tables for all population density hexes, and increasing the number of entries that deal with the doings of organized society as opposed to concentrating on monsters only.
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| Look at all these people. Surely some of them might do something foolish yet entertaining. (Larry Elmore in the Mentzer Basic Set) |
A sense of time, place, and social rituals
I've always liked how games like Pendragon and Ars Magica had a sense of the years rolling on, with gestures at the characters existing outside of "adventuring mode" and integrated into the world around them.
At this point, I think it means shifting some elements of gameplay time to longer units of measurement (like seasons) and also making hospitality a key part of traveling off the beaten path (few inns, less camping). If I do it right, I think it may help create more interesting time pressure choices as well as address a bit of the whole "adventuring day" type of gameplay.
I also would like it if the players (and characters) are happy when the random tables roll comes up "this place is famous for their local delicacy: spicy sausages" beyond purely as roleplaying fodder.
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| Wonder if they have any good food here? (not sure of source, it might be the Witcher concept art?) |
Make religion, gods, and spirits more mysterious
This is purely a taste thing - then again what home brew isn't - but I'm pulling out Clerics and Paladins. There are a bunch of aesthetic reasons behind it, but more practically it means I have to figure out how to handle game balance in the absence of convenient PPHM (person-portable healing magic). I'm looking at a bit of a mechanic on temporary hit points, and porting a bunch of the Cleric magic and abilities to other parts of the game.
Of course, it's OSR so "game balance" is not finely tuned or crucial, so I'm not stressing over it. But having/ not having PPHM and turning available is a default assumption with some consequence.
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| A king sacrificed to avert famine (Midvinerblot by Carl Larsson) |
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No rules or tables or anything useful to other folks in this post. Rather it's a statement of intent and - hopefully - something that'll help me keep my eyes on the ball as I continue brewing. With a bit of luck something useful will come out of it eventually.
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