The Jungle is Dark, but Full of Diamonds: Planning a Pulp Jungle Hexcrawl #2

 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. . . 

The Jungle is Dark, but Full of Diamonds: Planning a Pulp Jungle Hexcrawl #1

 I'm currently running a Barsoom/Purple Planet styled sci-fi desert planet hex crawl, but I'd guess my group is about half done and it's time to start preparing for our next campaign. 

I put out a survey to my players, and the number one choice was "Pulp Jungle Hexcrawl". Allllrighty then!

I'd like to use this blog to track my process for creating this new hexcrawl. The desert sci-fi campaign I'm currently running is my first try at a hexcrawl and I'm keen to take what I've learned to be more intentional when planning this next one. I hope that sharing will help other GM's who are running hexcrawls in their planning as well.

I'm also going to use our previous set of houserules, "a village a forest a dungeon a beast" as a template. I'm hoping this can streamline the process and leave me with some kind of artifact of the effort to hang onto for the future. Hopefully, I can find some decent public domain art and make a PDF out of it, too.

To kick things off, here is a d20 list to create a 'turn of the century' jungle explorer . . .

 I'll post more of my prep work as I move forward with the project!

WORLDS OF WONDEROUS WEBSITES!?

 The number of amazing free OSR resources posted on the internet is amazing. I am constantly astounded by the creativity and generosity present in this community. I've downloaded a number of texts and PDFs that were freely offered, paid (and not paid) for Pay What You Want products on DriveThruRPG and itch.io, and learned loads of new tricks and ideas by reading blogs that I've discovered on r/osr.

Sharing via blog and PDF is standard practice amongst OSR creators and I'm so thankful that folks do this!

When Gavin Norman of Necrotic Gnome put the OSE SRD system resource document online I was blown away! What a useful resource! Not only did it share the rules in a clear and very table-accessible way for GMs and players using a smartphone or device, it even had great generators attached for treasure, magic items, and the like.  

This got me wondering why more OSR creators don't use websites and wikis to share their rules and creations. PDFs are great, but often they are arranged and laid out with the printed medium in mind. Sometimes it can be difficult to read a PDF on a small screen if you are on your smartphone at the game table. A website like the OSE SRD provides quick links to access information easily and adjusts the view to fit your screen. It's pretty handy . . . 

Sooooo, I've decided to put my rules and campaign toolkit "a village a forest a dungeon a beast" online in the form of a Google Site. VFDB Online (lol) will have all of the rules and tables in the PDF, but in the medium of a website.

I hope it's useful to anyone who wants to see the rules or access a table. 

Let me know if you think it's a useful medium for sharing OSR rules and content!

A VILLAGE A FOREST A DUNGEON A BEAST

 In 1975 Gary Gygax wrote an article in a 'zine called Europa 6-8 about a process that a game master could follow to create their own campaign world in 5 weeks. It was tidily reprinted and published in a nice little zine  by Ray Otus. 

The process was actually quite lucid and do-able, despite the prevailing image of the nerdy DM madly scrawling notebooks full of lore and maps before even getting a group together. In fact, Gygax's process was refreshingly minimalist and made perfect sense! 

After I read that article, I goofed around to create my own campaign world a few times. I came to the conclusion that if I could distill that process into a zine and come up with some random generators to support it, I would be able to bust our content for gaming pretty quickly in the future. 

So, over the last year or so I've worked towards creating a booklet to do just that: to shrink the week long process that Gygax suggested into as short a time as possible. 

The zine is called "a village a forest a dungeon a beast" after the main components of the campaign world it creates: 

1.  The Village: a small hamlet in the border country with a few important NPCs that your party might need to talk to: a Lord, Blacksmith, Trader, Vicar, Crone, etc.

2. The Forest: nearby wilds with some particular fantastic, spooky, and strange locations to visit or stumble upon

3. The Dungeon: a nearby dungeon to delve that is home to . . .

4. The Beast: a monster with a particular theme and need who is the 'big bad' of the campaign, at least at the start. I was very much inspired by THE BEAST (ahem, same name even), so thanks and credit where it's due!

Like many of you, I have a busy schedule and taking the time to create a new campaign can be difficult. The 5-week process in Europa and the Gygax 75 challenge is fun, but I needed an even lower barrier to entry to make it jive with my lifestyle.

I dug through all of my scattered links, notes, and resources to compile some lists all in one place to make the process a little bit quicker. The output is definitely not a complete campaign: but it's a good seed to get started and I think that with the right group and a GM who is comfortable ad-libbing at the table it's a good place to start. It is working well with my group so far.

 I've put it up on DriveThruRPG for anyone who wants to check it out. You can access a web version here. I would super appreciate any feedback in the comments!