The Jungle is Dark But Full of Diamonds: Prepping a Pulp Jungle Hexcrawl #6

I've been slowly but surely prepping a 'pulp jungle hex crawl' for my group's next campaign. I've been all over the place with regard to what resources to use and how to make best use of my time.

Last time, I posted a very minimalist hex map of a jungle island. Since then, I've been wrestling with how best to balance using content from other sources while still scratching a creative itch. My main inspirations are Hot Springs Island, Isle of Dread, and A Thousand Thousand Islands. Right now, the breadth of those sources of inspiration is competing with my natural tendency for minimalism and streamlined everything.

Honestly, reading and re-reading the above sources was super engaging, but working on how to synthesize them was kind of giving me a headache. I decided to pull myself away from analysis paralysis and just get started on some usable items for the table. Time for a checklist and some maps.

Based on the hex map I slapped together, I needed the following:

• 9 Jungle Tombs/Temples
• 5 Mines
• 4 Villages
• 4 Forts

I decided to start with the tombs and temples. I felt briefly compelled to make my own from scratch, but I quickly realized that I just don't have the time resources right now for it. Plus, there are loads of amazing tools online that could help. 

I embraced minimalist prep and headed to Watabou's page on itch.io. Whatabou has a jillion amazing random generators for just about anything you could ever need. They are kind enough to allow folks to use the output of the generators in private and commercial creations as well. The look of the dungeons matches a jungle motif (in my opinion) since it has flooding built into the generator and includes random debris and crumbly bits. 

I quickly zapped out nine small-medium sized dungeons with and without room numbers. I'll stock the dungeons after. Here's a peek at one of the dungeons. If you need a slick dungeon map on the quick for a session, you really gotta check out Watabou's one page dungeon generator page.

Next was the mines. I took a trip to Dyson's Dodecahedron and flipped through the free commercial use content in the Release the Kraken section. There was a bunch of gorgeous maps, as usual, but I found myself having to think too much again. I really wanted to get table-ready fast and stick to my minimalist philosophy. 

So, I veered off to Donjon to see what I could find. I used the random dungeon generator to create some caverns. I like the look of the raw output, but I'm not sure what the usage rights are for the site. Not wanting to misuse anyone's stuff, I figured I should somehow jumble-ify the output to make it my own.

 To do that I downloaded the caverns as .tsv files and uploaded them into Dungeon Scrawl. Dungeon scrawl spit out some slightly boxier versions of the content. I don't quite like the look as much as the raw output from Donjon, but I don't mind it too much either.

As for Dungeon Scrawl, it's a phenomenal resource and just one more great example of the generosity and creativity in the OSR community. 

The last item that I was able to check off the list were villages. Back to Watabou who has one more awesome generator that I would use for this. The village generator creates different sizes of villages on different landscapes with all kinds of options. I just wanted small, low density jungle villages. Here's an example of what I was able to retrieve:

So, not distinctly a jungle village I guess, but by removing roads from being displayed I think it looks a bit more rustic. I cranked the forest setting up full blast to get as much foliage on the map as possible to represent the dense jungle environment. I think it's fit to serve. 

The last step is the trading/military forts. I've not yet found a generator or source of maps that really has wooden pallisade protected forts. The search continues!

I'll share more about my process of prepping this campaign as I go along!

The Jungle is Dark But Full of Diamonds: Prepping a Pulp Jungle Hexcrawl #5

I posted my minimalist hex crawl map from my previous blog post to r/osr in Reddit and got some positive feedback: big thank you to everyone who took the time to comment and offer their insight!

One person suggested to add color. I thought that was a good idea, so I whipped off these colorized versions as well. 

I think I like the middle one the best, with solid color hexes and no ocean indicated, but I'm not sure. Let me know what you think in the comments! I'd be super glad to hear any feedback anyone has. 

Part of me still likes the old black and white version, too. Decisions, decisions!

The Jungle is Dark but Full of Diamonds: Prepping a Pulp Jungle Hexcrawl #4

Continuing on with preparations for my groups upcoming campaign, I've decided to focus on creating a hex map to crawl across. I was a bit at a loss for how to structure more tables to run this, and I was also a bit confused about how I could create a map. 

For my campaign, I was originally going to use the Tomb of Annihilation Chult map. After checking it out further, I realized that there were just waaaay too many hexes on that sucker for the way we've been playing our hex crawl. Up until now, we've been traveling one hex per day in our Barsoom/Purple Planet knock-off sci-fi hexcrawl campaign. I don't want to change our rules too much so that we can build off what we've learned as a group to make the next campaign roll along smoothly. 

Then, I became very enamored with the map from Isle of Dread for the super old-school charm it exudes. Still, it had possibly too many hexes and was a bit messy when I tried to scan it. Also, I didn't care for the numbers on the hexes. I find numbers immersion busting, and since we play online I need to share maps with players.

Finally, I decided that since I want to make a project out of this campaign that I can share, I'd best just make my own. I bopped off and visited game-icons.net and found some icons that matched up with my needs. Credit where it's due, I found the following pretty sweet icons to use in my map. I'm going to link them right here so the creators get their due:

• Peaks icon CC BY 3.0 by Lorc
• Caldera icon CC BY 3.0 by Lorc
• Mountain cave icon CC BY 3.0 by Delapouite
• Jungle icon CC BY 3.0 by Delapouite
• Swamp icon CC BY 3.0 by Delapouite
• Columbian statue icon CC BY 3.0 by Delapouite
• Stakes fence icon CC BY 3.0 by Delapouite
• Island icon CC BY 3.0 by Delapouite
• Village icon CC BY 3.0 by Delapouite

Thanks to both of these folks for allowing people to use their very cool icons. 

After downloading hex-shaped versions of the icons above, I opened up a transparent hex grid in GNU Image Manipulation Program (I can't abide using the short-form...) and copy pasted the icons in, more or less at random. I decided to use the statue icon to represent trapped temple/dungeons that my players can loot. 

The village icon will represent villages of the locals who are indigenous to the island, maybe human or possibly monstrous. The palisade looking icon will represent trading forts set up by a colonizing trade company. The cave mountains will be mines of magical diamonds. The mountain, volcano, jungle, swamp, and beach looking ones are self-explanatory. Everything not a hex is ocean. 

I feel really good about having just plopped them anywhere. This kind of placement could take me all day if I let myself think about it, so I much prefer just jamming them anywhere and making it up as I go later on. I don't think my players will care when we're at the table and I don't care to spend that much time on the little bits. My design philosophy is low-prep and minimalist, so I want to stick to that all the way through.

After slapping a white background behind it to see it better, this is the final map of the island.

Now, I'm sure some of you will look at this and say, "Oh, man, that's ugly!" and I'll admit, it's got nothing on Mike Schley's Chult! But, it's easy to see, minimalist as heck, and I really think it will serve the purpose while we play. It's still got quite a few hexes, but the super-basic hex shape of the overall island makes everything kind of within reach. Jungle and mountains are both tricky to traverse, so I'll stick with one hex per day like we are currently doing in our ongoing campaign. There are enough interesting sites like dungeons, trading forts, villages, and mines scattered about to keep things interesting I think.

Your mileage may vary, but when I look at this map I want to play! What do you think? Too simple? Have I misplaced any icons? Am I missing any important tropes? I'd be stoked if you comment and let me know! 

The Jungle is Dark, but Full of Diamonds: Prepping a Pulp Jungle Hexcrawl #3

Work is slow but ongoing on preparing for our next campaign, voted by my players to be a "pulp jungle hexcrawl". I'm sticking with my "A Village A Forest A Dungeon A Beast" framework for preparing to:

1) See if it works across genres (with some modification of course) and 

2) Hopefully save a few brain cells by reusing my old tables and structures as much as possible.

The rules that we use for online play are very simple and 'item based', drawing heavily upon the approach taken in ICRPG and Knave with generally classless PCs who are defined by the items they carry. This means that coming up with interesting and useful items is pretty important. 

That said, our system treats most weapons and armor exactly the same: weapons do 1d6 points of damage and armor reduces damage from a single attack by half once per item per session. The real fun are the items which could see many different uses depending on the context. 

My table is below. It's got numbers for rolling random treasure on the fly, but I usually let players select three items when starting a brand new player character.

I struggled a bit with the armor section given the 'turn of the century' setting that I'm using for the campaign. I tried to include some tropey items like a pith helmet that were obvious. Some others are just tribal versions that players might find more of depending on where they shop on the jungle island.

Have a look and tell me what you think fits and what I might have missed! Thanks!

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. . .