I'm continuing to plan my group's next campaign, which players voted to be a 'pulp jungle hexcrawl'.
It would be easy to just use a pre-made module or adventure. Two that stand out as being particularly awesome are the somewhat new Hotsprings Island and the super-classic Isle of Dread. But what's the fun in that? :P
Instead, I'm going to create my own jungle hexcrawl resource to use, similar in structure to our existing house rules. I've printed those rules out in PDF form here, and you can see them in a website right here. Have a peek and comment if you like or dislike what you see.
One difference between the fantasy rules linked above and our current sci-fantasy Barsoom desert wasteland hexcrawl campaign is the place 'magic' holds. In fantasy campaigns, its part and parcel of the fabric of the genre. In my "a village a forest a dungeon a beast' homebrew we used slot-based inventory (stolen from Knave). In this case, each spell was inscribed in a wand, book, rune or something and took one spell slot and could be used once per day. Simple. My players enjoyed this and I stuck with it for my sci-fantasy desert crawl: this time the 'magic' effects were tied to weird technology and devices, but functioned the same.
In this jungle campaign, I'm thinking of magic being a little more rare, but still present. Spells will be tied to strange artifacts in a more Cthulu-style, Indiana Jones type thing. When you find the artifact you gain access to its weird and dangerous magic.
I've made a table for generating strange jungle magic artifacts below. I played around with this with my kid and it was easy to come up with extra flavor to add about how the spell was cast to make the artifacts more fun. For example, a monkey paw closes its fingers into a fist, limiting the PC to using the spell 5 times. A bag of herbs must have some of the contents burnt, with the effect being tied to the smoke, a riverstone rubbed or a whistle played into the wind. The "Title" column offers the chance to tie another effect to the artifact: a cursed or unlucky item might give you -1 to all rolls while a beloved or fragrant artifact might give a bonus to NPC interactions. Up to the GM.
The table output is read: "The title artifact of prefix suffix" with the spell effect it contains being tied to the spells in my other rules "a village a forest a dungeon a beast".
For example, "The Screaming Golden Idol of Ilzkaka" can be used to cast an illusion once per day, but the golden monkey statue screeches like an angry howler monkey when it's used. Or something like that. . .
