Quantity Begets Quality - 15 Room Dungeons?

Last post's discussion of quantity begetting quality and Dungeon23 got me thinking about dungeon levels.  I've been noodling around with the theory of gauntlet dungeons for checks calendar almost three years (2021 - map generation and wandering lairs.  2022 - disruptive+fodder encounter design.  2023 - thinking about blockers), and I still haven't overcome inertia, because I want what I make to be good.  But this "quantity begets quality" argument suggests that this may be entirely the wrong approach - I should try making lots of potentially-crappy dungeon levels that challenge things and see what sticks.

If one were to approach challenge dungeon construction through the lens of continuous habit, the question becomes "what's a reasonable self-contained minimal unit that I could make a habit of producing, such that I could produce them in quantity?"

I think for a challenge dungeon, it's probably small dungeon levels, not just individual rooms.  A while back I picked up the Mausolean Maze of Mondulac the Mad.  It's an interesting product but I never reviewed it properly.  It's a collection of stocked, tileable geomorphs with a "hedge maze full of undead" theme.  I like its statement of "good vanilla" as an ideal for published products.  I think it has a couple problems though.  The author adopted the constraint that the level map and key much fit on a single pair of facing pages, which forces small maps and short keys.  The most keyed items in any single geomorph is 10, and there are very few (if any) empty rooms.  It just feels very dense, and there are only a couple of 'morphs that support 1st-level characters.  If you stumble in at 1st and actually do random selection when you move from one to the next as suggested, it's going to be a very rough time.

Tileable / composable small levels as a minimum unit is a pretty promising idea.  And in "challenge dungeon" philosophy, each one can challenge one or two tactics.  For a "dungeon dimensions" or "mad wizard did it" funhouse dungeon, tiling in euclidean space is also not required for composability.  Portals and teleporters solve many problems.

So what is the right size?  I think it might be about 15 rooms.  Using B/X's or ACKS' stocking tables, this gets you something like 5 empty rooms (one with treasure), 5 monster rooms (likely one lair), 2-3 traps (one with treasure), and 2-3 specials.  This seems like about the minimum amount of stuff to get a proper stand-alone "OSR dungeoneering experience".  It's enough rooms that it could conceivably be jayquayed, there's enough monsters to maybe pick up some allies against the lair (light faction play), there's likely to be nonzero treasure from the number of empties and traps and maybe the lair.  Sufficient empty rooms to rest in, route through, or mistakenly search for traps.  If you're tiling these, they could easily each be "a lair and its sphere of influence / territory".  Obviously these ratios are a starting point and all parameters are subject to mutation and selection, but it seems about right.

I wonder if such a format is an answer to the Five Room Dungeon meme, which is too small for much jayquaying and usually run very railroady, often quantum-ogre-y, with little interest in player agency...

As for the cadence...  I could definitely see doing a 15-room dungeon level per week.  Spend a night on the concept and encounter table, a night on the map.  The 5 empty rooms are easy, just need a little dressing.  That leaves you with 10 rooms to stock in 5 days, so about two rooms a night, some of which are likely to be pretty trivial.  And if you actually managed a tiny dungeon per week minus sickness/vacation, you're looking at 50 levels a year.  If you take the best 10 of them and glue them together, you've got a 150-room "kilodungeon".  And if your players decide to hare off in some other direction, you've got plenty of "b-sides" material ready to go...

One interesting question that perhaps my old prep logs would answer is - if you're running a game concurrently with trying to do this, would one level a week be enough that you could actually "throw away" a good percentage of it?  If your players burn through 15 rooms a week, and you prep 15 rooms a week, you aren't accumulating any slack for bad experiments.  Maybe this is where the megadungeon comes into play; restocking old areas that players retread frequently might be less work than coming up with new ideas, and the pace of exploration of new areas slows as distances from the entrance increase, so your ability to accumulate a buffer increases over time?

From the logs, it looks like the most new rooms they explored in one session was eight  during the first session, and that tapered down a bit for a while as they went back and forth with a lair, and then picked up again and stabilized around five new rooms per session.  So maybe 15 rooms per week is actually enough to build up a decent lead.  On the other hand, the Dungeon23 approach of one room a day would barely have kept ahead of my old players, provided that the rate of exploration didn't drop off again.

As for actual size of a tile...  I think 16x16 is probably plenty.  Given 15 rooms or so, if the typical size is 30x30, that uses 135 of the 256 squares in a 16x16 block.  So that leaves us with plenty of space for big rooms, long hallways, secrets, etc.  And room to deviate up from 15 rooms, I suppose.  12x12 would be adequate if we were willing to commit to minimal space between rooms.  14x14 might be ideal but it's just such a weird gross number, whereas 256 is pleasingly round.  If I decide I have the wrong tilesize, oh well.  Putting little shim-zones with boring hallways in between tiles seems pretty viable.

I don't know if I want to commit to creating dungeon levels on a cadence, but at the very least embracing the ethos of "don't wait pontificating for perfection, just make stuff and some of it will be good" and fiddling with making levels is probably something I should start doing.

Mapping and Measuring - Paces

I recently picked up an old used copy of Sleightholme's Better Boat Handling.  I had some trouble with docking this summer and it seemed like it might be a worthwhile read over the winter to build up a set of drills to run in the spring.  I haven't sat down and read it yet but I flipped through and looked at some exercises.  On page 22 it suggested:

Exercise 3: Distance judging

Whenever you are out walking and the opportunity occurs, note objects ahead such as typical two-story buildings, people, cars, gates, etc.  Guess their distance and then count your paces.  It is not merely size of distant objects but detail that gives the clue to distance.  A window, for instance, loses its bars as distance increases, then its rectangular form, and then finally it becomes a dot.

Lack of intuition about distances is a serious problem I have had - many canonical-ish instructions in docking or man-overboard drills measure distances in boat-lengths.  I know how long the boat is in feet, but projecting that out multiple times across the water is more difficult.  So I took note of this exercise and have started playing with it; I can do it even if I can't put a crew together for a given day, or the weather's bad, or whatever.  It seems like it would also be useful for anyone running wilderness encounters.  How much detail can you make out about a group of people and/or orcs at, say, 50 yards with the naked eye? (see also this old post)

The mention of measuring distances in paces also got me thinking about the dungeon game.  If I tell the players that the room is 30' by 40', how did they determine that?  I have never stopped the game to ask my players how they want to measure a room.  The default dungeon exploration speed is low enough that I could definitely see pacing the length and width of the room being viable for getting pretty accurate measurements within the allotted time.  But doing this would also expose you to danger from traps or enemies in the room.  So now I'm wondering whether I just want to give descriptions like "big, longer away from you than it is wide" and "small room" up until they have paced it.  Or give them estimated distances in tens of feet, but with a roll for error, and then if they pace it they can get accurate distances?  idk.

I also think it would be fun to give room sizes and distances in paces instead of feet.  Just like using stone for encumbrance, it's a quaint and evocative unit with a little bit of slop.

As usual, this led down a shallow wikipedia rabbithole, with a couple of interesting findings:

• Alexander the Great brought specialist pace-counters along with his army to measure distances, and their accuracy was so good that some now think they must have had an odometer.  How much does a specialist bematist demand in monthly wages, I wonder?
  
• You know those wheels surveyors use to measure distances?  Another name for them is a "waywiser".  I love it - it's alliterative and very Olde English.  If you put them on your equipment table, definitely use that name.
• Apparently pace-counting is still used by the military and they use beads on a string to help keep track of large counts.  I did find myself wondering if I were occasionally slipping up with counts up towards a hundred while I was walking my block this morning; these make total sense.
  

Getting a Sense for 24-Mile Hexes

I'm considering doing some mapping on 24-mile hex scales, and wanted to get a sense of just how big that was.  Previously I had imposed a ~24-mile hex grid over parts of France, but that doesn't really tell me much.  But the same technique was easy to apply to more familiar country:

One could reach most of these same conclusions from just looking at numbers - distances between cities, areas of states.  But it's still interesting.

Pennsylvania is something like 85 or 90 24-mile hexes - enough area to be a Kingdom by ACKS' standards.

Massachusetts is maybe 16 hexes, somewhere in the large duchy to small principality range.  The projection might be messing with this a bit, I think taking MA's land area and dividing it by the area of a 24-mile hex I get closer to 20 hexes.

Lake Erie is something like 16 24-mile hexes - enough area to be a merfolk duchy.

Even Rhode Island is good hex or two (or three by the numbers).

It's only about four hexes from DC to Richmond - about a week encumbered on foot at 60' speed or with a cart with plenty of draft animals.

Megacity Ruin Hexes

New York City proper basically occupies a whole 24-mile hex; it's 32 miles from Yonkers to the southwestern tip of Staten Island, 25 miles from that tip of Staten Island to JFK airport, and 18 miles from JFK to Yonkers.  And that's ignoring Newark and most of Long Island.  Washington DC proper is 70 square miles (about two full 6-mile hexes) and is maybe a 6th of the DC metro area.  The DC beltway and the ring-road around Boston both have radii of about 10 miles, and there's plenty of 'burbs outside those rings.  In a post-apocalyptic setting, one could readily fill an entire 24-mile hex with terrain type "ruined city" and it wouldn't be crazy.

Culture Distances

New York City is 13 hexes by land to Richmond or 14 by sea to Norfolk, and 14 hexes by sea or 8 by land to Boston - and those were distances great enough for significantly different cultures, accents, and modes of life to emerge and persist for a long time, even starting from a shared language.  This checks out if you look at France too - Paris to the middle of Brittany (which was unified with the French crown in 1532 but where only half of the population spoke French in 1900) is about 10 hexes, and Paris to Zurich is about 12 hexes.  From the southwestern tip of Flanders to the northeastern end of the Netherlands, the whole region where Dutch is the primary language, is only about 240 miles - 10 hexes.

Philadelphia to Pittsburgh is 11 hexes across a mountain range, well up into that "cultural divergence" distance.  Hence the Westsylvania movement.  Pittsburgh to Chicago is another 19 hexes - enough distance for at least one complete divergent regional culture (and likely a dialect if not a whole new language) in between them.

This 10-hex cultural divergence distance is also interesting from the perspective of kings of people, not of places - if every 10 hexes or so of forest and hills you have a culture shift, then the natural size for a kingdom of a people, of a culture, is about 10 hexes by 10 hexes of such terrain.  Which is on the low side for a kingdom in ACKS, but it's in the right range.  It's possible I've accidentally picked odd boundary situations (though I'm not aware of a big natural barrier between Brittany and Paris...).  At this size, you can march your army from one side of the kingdom to the other and back in about two months.  "Two weeks from the center to the border" might be a reasonable heuristic.  Beyond that you start getting into empire - you can conquer them and extract tribute, but they'll retain their own culture for a long time (longer than the campaign will run, in any case).

These numbers are also kind of in the right ballpark for a couple of other thing sin ACKS.  A kingdom in ACKS tends to have a single Class II market city, which has a trade range by road of 144 miles (6 24-mile hexes), which is a little short but means that the whole trade range (by road) is probably within the kingdom if the city is centrally located.  These sort of 10-hex distances are also towards the outer limit for supplying your army from a centrally-located capital city in Domains at War: Campaigns without having forward supply bases, too - the base range is 96 miles (4 24-mile hexes), but this is multiplied by 4 on roads or by 3 through "settled" territory.  Assuming a ring of settlement around the central market and then diminishing population density and road construction at the frontiers, we might reasonably expect to get x3 supply chain length for a good portion of the way but then logistics break down at the edge and we end up a little short of x3 overall.  So it's the area you can definitely project power into with no prep.

...  it's about 290 miles from London to Dublin as the crow flies and that's sure a culture-border that has persisted over centuries.  London to the south edge of Scotland is about 275 miles by land, 11 hexes.  London to the edge of Cornwall is only about 7 hexes and the Cornovii have mostly lost their own language (though it took a thousand years from when the Saxons arrived) and have a dialect of English, while London to the edge of Wales is a mere 6 hexes - but there's some rough country in Wales, and the English language didn't start making inroads into Wales until the Industrial Revolution, which is well after the period we're interested in modeling cultural dynamics for.

(I eagerly await corrections from my readers in the UK)

I don't really have a good theory of these sort of culture-distances along nautical routes yet.

Nautical Matters

At 72 miles per day (three hexes), it would be four days by sail from NYC to either Norfolk or Boston with favorable winds.  Those numbers don't seem totally crazy - the Everglades Challenge is a motorless small craft race from Tampa to Key Largo, which is 275 or 300 miles (11-12 hexes) or so, and the winning time in 2013 (which mostly had a favorable wind out of the north) was around two days of near-constant sail with very little sleep.

The continental shelf is also interesting, 2-4 hexes of shallow ocean off of the coast before the bottom drops off and it gets deeeep.  It might be merciful to have separate encounter tables for littoral vs pelagic ocean with different weights for dragon turtles.

BH2 and Lost Secrets of the Old Hexmappers

Having read the Boot Hill rules, I decided to pick up a couple of the old modules too, because hey, you can get the whole line for less than a single expensive system.  I read BH5: Range War first and it was fine (sadly it did not have the "how much does having a farm or ranch earn you, the owner?" questions I had from the core rules), but BH2: Lost Conquistador Mine (by no less a pair than Cook and Moldvay) has some interesting stuff going on.

In particular, there's a hex map of a region of wilderness and they do some things with it that I've never seen on a hex map for an RPG before. 

The two biggest and most obviously novel things are that some hex-sides are marked as impassable, and the visibility distances of some features are marked on the map itself.

Impassable hex-sides occur along ridge-lines through high mountains.  On reflection this seems like sort of an obvious thing to do, coming from the wargaming tradition - there are impassable hex-sides on the OGRE map, if I recollect rightly.  But I've never seen it on an RPG wilderness map before!  The best you ever get is that rivers are sometimes impassable except at certain points.  But making hex-sides impassable for other reasons is an interesting tool for the Wilderness as Dungeon toolbox - sometimes the rooms really do have hard walls!  And it gives Climb Sheer Surfaces a use in wilderness play too.  This might be an interesting way to represent the fact that many mountains can only be summited by a few routes (four trails up Fuji, fewer up Everest and Rainier if I recollect rightly).

Mountain peaks are also marked with a pair of numbers, the first representing the number of hexes away from which they can be seen with the naked eye, and the second representing the distance at which they can be seen with a telescope.  I don't know how they determined these numbers; it seems like taking prominence above surrounding terrain into account could be tricky.  But they look mostly pretty reasonable, if you're willing to accept the abstraction that they're visible at the same distance in all directions.  Anyway, I'm just thrilled to see spotting distance for mountain peaks on a hex-map at all.  The Old Masters were worrying about the same things that Trilemma and I do.  Maybe we're on the right track.

Visible from 2 5-mile hexes with the naked eye, or 6 hexes with a telescope

On a similar "on the right track" note, the module comes with a hex-map for the players to fill in as they explore, with just a small section around the starting town filled in.  Cook and Moldvay knew: Never show them the map!

And the treasure map that is given to players is a stained, torn, creased, hand-drawn mess, and the text on it is in German (back in a pre-smartphone pre-machine translation age).  German is a great choice really, since it's sort of close to English, enough that you can probably draw some conclusions in combination with the drawings, but not high-confidence ones.  Some of the landmarks on it are also no longer accurate within the game-world, or not quite as unique as the map's author thought.  It's a wonderful "give them some hints but don't just tell them where it is" treasure map.

A curiosity that I hadn't seen on a hex map before is that there's a dry riverbed, which can only be entered and exited in certain directions in certain hexes.  Naturally, it can also flash-flood.  Sort of a variation on blocked hex-sides.

One other odd property of this map is its sparseness.  I haven't done a precise count of its rows and columns, but I reckon it about 20 hexes tall and 50 or 60 wide.  In those thousand hexes, there are about 15 named and described features (which have visibility numbers in the map's key) only a couple of which have people, plus about ten mountain peaks.  It's very sparse.  And only about ten wilderness encounters are described (one of which can only take place in a particular region).  So I'm not sure what to make of this.  I'm a big believer that putting something in every hex is an unreasonable amount of work, but having one feature per 40 hexes (counting the peaks) is lower than even I would expect.  It's an interesting reference point I suppose.  Maybe this is partly because it was intended as a tournament module and only needed to fill a single-digit number of hours; there was no need to fill a hex map to the same degree that you would if you were to run a sustained campaign on it?

In any case, a very interesting hex-map.

Undercity Dungeons and the Union-Find Algorithm

And since we've got no place to go
Write some code, write some code, write some code

The line-map of Herculaneum reminded me of a project I had back in college doing random maze generation using the union-find algorithm.  Since I have some free time over the holidays and nowhere to go, I figured I'd play with it some more and see if I couldn't get decent dungeon results out of it.

I may have also bombed a "generate a maze" question on a coding interview a few years back, and could maybe use the refresher.  I had 45 minutes to do it during the interview; doing it this time took me about two hours to get the result below (but I also had to do drawing).

This is an example of a maze generated using union-find.  It would not make a very good dungeon.  Union-find guarantees that there is exactly one path from each cell to each other cell, which is the very opposite of jayquaying, and this also means that there won't be anything resembling a room, since an open 2x2 square has two paths from each corner to each other corner (first moving vertically, then horizontally, or first moving horizontally, then moving vertically).

What we can do though, is carve out structure beforehand, and then let the mazing fill in the rest and make sure it's all connected.

Here's what that looks like with rooms:

This still doesn't give us loops though.  When I first started working on this post I was thinking about trying to do something like two independent passes of union-find to generate multiple paths most of the time between each pair of cells.  That sounds tricky though.  Having gotten most of the way there, I think I could just do the same thing with loops that I did with rooms - just punch loops into the grid before we do the mazing.  Likewise, if we wanted long "road" corridors and a forum in the middle where they cross, we could put those in before mazing.  This is similar to what I did manually in Rathell, adding intentional loops and then creating tree structures inside them.

Adding loops (highlighted in red) and regenerating, we can get something like this:

So this is getting better.  Sometimes the loops all end up in one part of the map, which is unfortunate, and I should probably do something to make sure they're a little more evenly-distributed.  I might need the variance on the dimensions of the loops to be higher, so that full rooms end up contained inside them more often, for that "city block full of buildings which contain rooms" feel.  The other thing obviously missing for this to be a dungeon map is doors.  Having a loop always contain a secret door makes it less obviously a rectangular loop.  But those are more annoying to draw.  Adding secret doors to random edge removal could be both really interesting and really dangerous, because you could cut off a whole section of the dungeon, but you could also just get a small secret section, which is desirable.

Other potential extensions: 

• Add options for roads and forum.  
• Number the rooms on the map.  
• It's sort of annoying how frilly, nooksome, etc these maps are; I could see them being super-annoying to describe in play to a mapper.  Might be good for a melee+mapping gauntlet level though - just add minotaurs!  
• Add ability to serialize dungeon levels to some sort of format which can be processed by subsequent programs (for eg stocking rooms)
• Add the ability to take partially-specified (manually-generated) dungeon files as input and then maze / fill in the unspecified parts.
• Generate multiple levels (slightly varying map generation parameters for each one) and link them together with stairwells
• Unreasonably huge recursive dungeon, where each cell of the outer map represents a whole dungeon level, and the links or walls between its neighbors indicate passages between dungeon levels.
  

Anyway, it's on github.  It was a fun afternoon project.

Undercity Dungeons and Turning City Maps into Dungeons

I got to thinking about dungeons under cities last night.  I'm not sure why exactly; I think it might've been that I've been thinking about variable corridor width since the gauntlets post, and it linked up with variable road width, the difference between broad streets and narrow alleys.

Many ancient cities were built on the ruins of older settlements, and if you repeated this process multiple times then it makes sense for an undercity dungeon to have multiple levels, with each deeper layer being the buried ruins of an older settlement.

Obviously placement beneath a population center has some nice properties for a campaign tentpole megadungeon besides just explaining its existence; low-level parties don't need to brave the wilderness to get there, the loop to resupply and return to the dungeon is tighter, and you have a ready source of rival adventuring parties.  But I think taking each layer / level as a layer of past settlement has further advantages which are less often talked about.

If you take a neighborhood as your basis for a dungeon level, rather than a single building, it might get a lot easier to manage mentally.  You can give your corridors street names and your rooms addresses.  Assigning functions to rooms should be easier here than in my traditional Dwarf Fortress-style dungeons, because you can reuse functions - each settlement was an independent layer, so each layer should have somewhere that was a granary or a forge, for example, versus a highly-vertical Dwarf Fortress-style dungeon where you have one granary or forge area for the whole dungeon.  So you need fewer ideas, and you can get mileage out of your everyday experience of the simple necessities of life as a civilian, versus trying to think of what dwarves would need in their fortresses or what evil wizards need in their towers.

I think the main difficulty might be dealing with density.  If you look at maps of Pompeii or Herculaneum, they're pretty dense, with many houses sharing walls.  This isn't how most people live in the modern West, but it would make for great dungeoneering.

Tell me this doesn't look like a dungeon map

Another interesting difference from typical dungeon maps is that when you have long, straight roads-turned-corridors, it becomes relatively easy to get close to any single point in the dungeon, versus having a mess of twisty corridors where all routes are circuitous.  I'm not sure that's a desirable property, but it might be worth experimenting with.  Certainly there were pre-industrial settlements with road patterns that would make mapping hell for the players (more hub-and-spoke than grid).  Playing with road patterns would be an interesting way to differentiate levels.

This does get away from the fantastical funhouse megadungeon and back towards the realistic ruins end of the dungeon spectrum though.  Still, it might be fun to throw a level with city-esque topology (of long, wide, straight corridors with branching narrow alleys and dense blocks of "housing") into a funhouse megadungeon.

So does anyone know of good sources of more line maps of archaeological cities like that one?

Rival Adventuring Parties and Dungeon Maps as Treasure

Been thinking about mapping more.  Once upon a time, my players encountered a rival adventuring party in the dungeon, fought them, and took their stuff.  At the time it didn't occur to either them or me that that rival party probably ought to have had a map of parts of the dungeon that they had explored.

On the one hand, having rival adventuring parties be a source of intel in addition to magic items makes them a great target.  Stealing their maps might even qualify as a good use for my least favorite thief skill, Picking Pockets, and maps could be a good target for skullduggery in town too rather than just in the dungeon.  I also like that this would allow a DM to provide information to the party about the layout of the dungeon, but there's a good reason for that information to be unreliable - just as the party may make mapping mistakes, so too their rivals.  This casts the players' map into doubt and requires them to resolve inconsistencies.  Some of my favorite mapping moments in previous campaigns have been when multiple players had their own maps and have had to build a consensus map out of their fragments, and having NPC maps as an additional source seems likely to lead to similar moments.

But on the other hand, figuring out what parts of the dungeon each rival party has explored and building unreliable map-fragments sounds like a pain in the ass.  It's the sort of thing that I would probably want to do after the session in which the party captured the map (ie, random encounter result of Rival Party, PCs capture the map, session ends, I figure out where exactly they had been and what they knew).  Maybe this is a good reason for OD&D's Read Languages to specify that it can be used to read maps - "Oh you didn't prepare Read Languages today?  I guess you can't read the map and will have to do it after the session."  Maybe it's normal for adventurers to keep their maps encoded, so that when captured you need to bring it back to town and spend some time deciphering it.  I dunno.

I wonder if the intent for treasure maps in OD&D was for them to be maps of parts of the dungeon, rather than maps pointing to wilderness lairs like I have used them in ACKS.  Looking at the text again it really doesn't say.

Infravision and Mapping

I lied, the nomad post is still in the works (it's like 80% done but I need to recheck my math and I had to reinstall my OS because I realized my kernel hadn't been updated since October 2018 and it's been an exciting two years for kernel exploits; I haven't copied my sourcebooks back over yet because my cat spilled water on the wallwart for my external hard drive enclosure.  It's been a fun week) but I had a quick thought while taking the trash out.

ACKS goes hard on removing infravision from PC races, because it leads to the party getting split into the infra-haves and the infra-have-nots.  I observed something like this once when I ran OSRIC - the assassins with infravision went out ahead and had all the adventure while the rest of the party hung back and occasionally came running to the rescue.  It wasn't great.  So I tend to agree with this move on ACKS' part.

I've been thinking about trying to run some OSE, which gives dwarves and elves 60' infravision.  I've been considering removing it from them but then I'd have to compensate them or rejigger their XP progression and it would get annoying.

Another issue I've run into while contemplating this is that I like having players maintain their own map of the dungeon (particularly - having one or more players each maintain their own maps representing items in the world that are being maintained by a character with two hands free), and that's annoying to do with VTTs.

Holding both of these in my head, they got to seeming sort of related.  Maybe mapping is one of the secret balance-points for infravision.  Maybe the rule "It is not possible to read in the dark with infravision, because fine detail cannot be perceived", the detail that it's heat vision instead of just light amplification, is important, because it means that if you have scouts with infravision out ahead of the party, they can't be mapping.  If you have a full-infravision party, they still need a light source to map.  So then you either need to have amazing spatial memory, or infravision becomes a fallback for when the light has been extinguished.

It's still not perfect; you could still get into a situation where you have the room-clearing commando group of dwarves and elves and then the baggage train of mapping humans and hobbits.  But it's a thought I hadn't had or heard explicitly before.  Maybe part of the cause when I ran into this problem in OSRIC is that I didn't know what I was doing and didn't make the party make their own map (also didn't throw random encounters at the back half of the party).

ACKS Morrowind: Market Classes, Trade Routes

Working out populations and market classes for all the towns of note:

Ald Velothi: One smith, no inns, ~1.5k population, Large Village, class V.  Age 1000-2000 years (it is Old Velothi after all), sea coast, scrub, hills.
Ald'ruhn: Previous post, population 4500, Small City, class IV.  Age 100-1000 years, desert, hills.
Balmora: Previous post, population 8000, Small City, class IV.  Age 1000-2000 years canonically but I dunno if that actually makes sense, riverbank, scrub, hills.
Caldera: One smith, one inn, ~2k population, Large Village, class V.  Age <20 years, scrub, hills.
Dagon Fel: No smiths, one inn, ~2k population, Large Village, class V.  Age <20 years, sea coast, scrub, hills?
Ebonheart: One very good smith but he's part of the garrison rather than serving civilian markets, one inn, big fortress, long-range boat service...  population 2k, Large Village, class V.  It's a military and administrative center, with supporting civilian population, but not much beyond that.  Would probably also have been the sensible place to put the Census and Excise office, and to have the prison ship arrive at.  Age <20 years (Armistice era), sea coast, grasslands, plains.
Ghostgate: inn and smith, but...  it's really just a fortress-monastery.  Class VI market at the fortress.  Age 100-1000 years (Tribunal era), desert, mountains.
Gnaar Mok: no inns, smiths, or taverns, population <400 (call it 350), Small Village, class VI.  Age 100-1000 years, sea coast, rainforest?, plains.
Gnisis: two non-garrison smiths, no inns, 3k population, Small Town, class V.  Age 100-1000 years, sea coast and river, scrub, hills.
Hla Oad: one smith but not open to the public, no inn but yes really lousy tavern, 400 population, Small Village, class VI.  Age 100-1000 years, sea coast, rainforest, plains.
Khuul: no smiths, no inn, one really lousy tavern, 400 population, Small Village, class VI.  Age 21-100 years, sea coast, scrub, hills.
Maar Gan: one smith, one inn, 2k population, Large Village, class V.  Age 100-1000 years, desert, mountains.
Molag Mar: two smiths, no inns, 3k population, Large Village, class V.  Age 100-1000 years, sea coast, desert, hills.
Pelagiad: one non-garrison smith, one inn, 2k population, Large Village, class V.  Age <20 years, Lake, Grasslands, Hills.
Sadrith Mora: Three smiths, two inns, population 4500, Small City, class IV.  Age 100-1000 years, sea coast, scrub, hills.
Seyda Neen: No smiths, one pretty decent tavern, population 500, Village, class VI.  Age <20 years years, sea coast, rainforest, plains.
Suran: One smith, no inns (but two "taverns"), 1500 population, Large Village, class V.  Age 1000-2000 years (canonically built concurrently with Balmora), river, lake, grasslands, hills.
Tel Aruhn: One smith, no inns, 1500 population, Large Village, class V.  Age 100-1000 years, sea coast, scrub, plains.
Tel Branora: One smith, one inn, 2000 population, Large Village, class V.  Age 100-1000 years, sea coast, scrub, plains.
Tel Mora: One smith, one inn, 2000 population, Large Village, class V.  Age 100-1000 years, sea coast, scrub, hills.
Vivec: Previous post, population 13000, City, class III.  Age 100-1000 years (right around 1000 in the mid-3rd Era), sea coast, lake, grasslands, plains.
Vos: No smiths, one inn, 2000 population, Large Village, class V.  Age 1000-2000 years (Velothi era), sea coast, savanna, plains.

One interesting thing that picking out ages highlights is that there were a number of cities built canonically in the Velothi / pre-Tribunal era.  It would make sense to have some ruined cities from that era too, probably around the propylon fortresses, since those are from that era too.  Gnisis is particularly intriguing in this light; it's right on a river mouth (a sensible place for an initial settlement), there's a propylon fortress right across the river, and Arvs-Drelen is a Velothi-era dome.

Adding trade routes (blue for water, brown for road) with ranges based on these market classes, here's what we get:

So we have one big component with Vivec, Balmora, Ald'ruhn, and the villages on the south and southwestern coasts, another component with most of the Telvanni towns on the northeast plus Dagon Fel, a small Redoran component in the northeast, and then a few isolated villages (Maar Gan and Gnaar Mok). 

My scale concerns strike again, but this time in the other direction - some of the settlements which have fast travel services (boats and silt striders) that you can hire to take you to other settlements in Morrowind are now out of each others' trade ranges.  I think the biggest offenders here are Tel Branora to Sadrith Mora, and the Gnisis component.  Not sure what, if anything, to do about this.  Probably just let players charter ships and silt striders anyway; I don't think the ACKS rules for chartering a vessel require it to be along a trade route.

I think this view frames the locations the Houses were trying to take in an interesting way.  Redoran's capital is cut off from his villages by distance, and probably relies on importing food from Hlaalu.  Taking Bal Isra would help link up Maar Gan, and then Shishi north of that pushes towards the sea to link up to Khuul.  For my money I'd've settled on the other side of the mountains though, building a chain of villages up the West Gash from Ald'ruhn to Khuul, plus taking the old fortresses of Andasreth and Berandas.  Maybe the northern approach through Bal Isra and Shishi was hatched after their failure to take Andasreth.

Hlaalu's stronghold of Odai Plateau solidifies his control of the river.  Telvanni's attempt to take Odirniran is the beginnings of a bridge between Tel Branora and the rest of his settlements; Uvirith's Grave is just one of six or so places Telvanni has taken in Molag Amur and the Ashlands (but this is the first mushroom tower there, rather than taking a Velothi dome).

I feel that Hlaalu's position is strong, with a big swath of productive, contiguous territory interrupted only by their Imperial allies, but there's not much more that they can take uncontested; Redoran's already mad about Caldera, and will probably block further expansion up the West Gash if they can.  The right play for Hlaalu might be to clear out Ald Sotha properly and expand their plantations into that part of the Ascadian Isles.  Redoran's position is a little precarious; they're committed into the Ashlands in support of the Temple.  Telvanni is expanding like crazy into the Grazelands, Sheogorad, Ashlands, and Molag Amur, but these expansions are mostly just some mid-level wizard taking a tower with his 3-5 henchmen, and they don't coordinate well, plus the land is pretty marginal.  Telvanni probably benefits from buying time for their wizards to level and their many tiny bases to mature in secret; buying this time probably looks a lot like playing Temple+Redoran against Imperial+Hlaalu and avoiding picking direct fights with either.  Or it would, if Telvanni were coordinated instead of infighting.

ACKS Morrowind: Maps

Been working on mapping.  Here's the poster map with a 24-mile grid over it.

I'm not in love with this particular gridding; a number of towns are very un-centered in their hexes (particularly annoying for Ghostgate), and Vos and Tel Mora are in the same hex.  But I'm not sure a regular grid that centers every town on the right scale is doable.

I also worry that this scale is somewhat too small.  It's only one or two 24-mile hexes from Ghostgate to Dagoth Ur.  From one end of the map to another, Vivec to Dagon Fel by boat, it's only five or six days under sail in a swift ship (not allowing sailing at night, as the coast is rocky and treacherous).  Under two weeks to circumnavigate the whole island, even in a slower sailing vessel and without sailing at night.

Here's another with overlays for population density.  Yellow hex overlay indicates taxable borderlands (~100 families per 6-mile hex; excludes the untaxed and illegible Ashlanders), green overlay indicates civilized population density (~250 families per 6-mile hex), and blue overlay indicates double-civilized population density (~500 families per 6-mile hex).

I think the total population comes up a few thousand families short of what I intended as of the first post; I think I could probably fit them into the blue hexes by raising population density there a little further.

The Wilderness Machine

Reflecting on my attempts to automate the wilderness (eg hexstocking), I realize that there was a failure of...  ambition, almost.  And definitely some failures of engineering, which made greater ambitions untenable.

If I'm going to automate, I should go whole-hog for a level of complexity which would be utterly unmanageable by a human, and design the system for that from the beginning, rather than just doing what a human DM would do given an abundance of free time and a dearth of creativity.  Does a submarine swim?

• Stock lairs in hexes according to terrain type.  Dwelling-type may be chosen from the random dungeon types table, if reasonable for monsters of this type to live in a hole in the ground.
• Actually, looking at the end of this where I'm considering migration, the more-correct solution is to start with an empty wilderness and run like 10 years of immigration and migration beforehand.
• For each lair, construct a "hunting range" of other hexes into which its monsters frequently wander.  Hunting range primarily based on monster speed, movement type, diet, and hex types.  Range concretizes some of Trilemma's nonmechanical difficulty elements.
• Sentient monsters taken prisoner can serve as wilderness guides throughout the range of their lair
• Monsters unlikely to pursue parties beyond the edge of their range
• Construct per-hex random encounter tables, based on the lairs whose hunting ranges contain that hex.
• Do not attempt to manually query these tables.  The user interface for this is "Machine, give me a random encounter for hex 0423" -> "Goblin warband from the village in hex 0625, with n champions, m goblins on wargs, 15kcp and a sword +1 interacting with 4 wild boars from lair in hex 0321".
• Actually though, I should drop lame-ass animal lairs and assume a reasonable, dense distribution of mundane wildlife (eg herd animals, normal-sized hawks, rats, ...).  If it isn't going to ever kill a wilderness-level PC, I don't need to track it as a monster.
• Favor monsters from lairs that the players have met before.  This both encourages narrative recurrence / campaign capital development, and is generally reasonable in terms of shared movement habits - if you reuse the same game trails and they reuse the same game trails, you're likely to run into each other again.
• Optionally, vary encounter tables with time of day, weather, season.  Bears hibernate in the winter, big cats hunt at dusk and dawn, giant bats are nocturnal, humanoids don't like hunting in the rain, ...
• Cut the day into 4-hour blocks - dawn (4-8), morning (8-12), afternoon (12-4), dusk (4-8), first watch (8-midnight), second watch (midnight-4)
• Likewise, vary probability of random encounter by individual hex, day/night, weather, season, ... instead of just terrain type.
• Manual update with results of encounter -> "goblin warband from village in hex 0625 destroyed"
• Monthly, check for monster migration. Monsters migrate based on monster-density in their hunting range, terrain types, season.  Monsters can also migrate in off the edges of the map (bounded area being simulated), and migrate off the edge of the map (though maybe known lairs do not migrate off-map).  Monsters less likely to migrate if they have a village, dungeon-lair, or lots of treasure.  Maybe also kill off some lairs during monthly rollover.
• Changing ranges might be a better approach, with lair migration only if no workable range is achievable that includes that lair hex.  On month rollover, greedy search from each lair for a set of hexes which generate an amount of population support sufficient for the lair and which minimize exposure to predation.  If no satisfying solution found, the lair migrates.  Perform updates in ascending order of speed; fast predators can reactively update their ranges in response to slow prey migration.
• Or each lair has a fixed amount of time/effort/utilization available to it, and this can be assigned to hexes to derive population support from them or to travel through them, with environmental factors and presence of predators making this less efficient.  Utilization of each hex also determines on a per-hex basis the weighting of the lair in that hex's random encounter table - you're more likely to have an encounter with wyverns in their hunting grounds than in the hexes under their flight path between hunting grounds and lair.  High utilization also means greater familiarity with the hex among captured sentients.

And then you feed the machine a big-ass hexmap, press go, and run an illegible Western Marches, where regions emerge from complex monster behavior over varied geography but don't have names and don't stay the same.  A really illegible approach would do away with hexes entirely, and make rollover a continuous rather than discrete process, but that's a lot more annoying for a computer (you can only approximate continuity, via very granular time or space), and this is probably crazy enough already.

The obvious question is "would this be fun to play in?"  And that I do not know.

BaltACKS

One of ACKS' default assumptions, which I've commented on before, is that of the "failing empire", with barbarians at the borders and corruption within.  Another of ACKS' standard assumptions it the inland sea, typically modeled after the Mediterranean in Antiquity.  But there's another perfectly good inland sea in Europe that gets a lot less attention: the Baltic.

Which, it turns out, is probably a fine model area-of-operations for a DaneACKS campaign.  Much more so than the North Sea, with its super-long travel distances and terrible weather.  The water-area of the Baltic is about 330 24-mile hexes, which is about a quarter of a 30x40 24-mile hex mapsheet, leaving plenty of room for surrounding lands.

One problem(?) with the Baltic as an ACKS setting is that Scandinavia and environs are, historically, not particularly well-populated.  At all.  In 1570, already somewhat after our target era, the population density of Sweden was only about 5.2 people per square mile, while that of Finland in 1550 was a mere 2.3 people per square mile.  At 300,000 people in an area of 130,666 square miles, you're looking at 60,000 families spread over (roughly) 4 30x40 mapsheets of 6-mile hexes.  In 1150, estimates (since at that time there was certainly no census, nor a centralized state to conduct one) place the total population of Finland between 20,000 and 40,000 people, or at most 8,000 families, giving a population density of about 0.3 people per square mile, which in ACKS terms suggests a handful of class VI markets over that entire area.  Which is...  rough, for adventuring and supply.  The rest of the Baltic isn't much better; Gdansk in the 1100s had a population somewhere between 1000 and 2000, which is a class V market.  Many of the population centers currently on the Baltic map above weren't even founded until Christianization hit, and population records for pre-Christian settlements (like Forsigtuna, the pre-Christian capital of Sweden) are basically nonexistent.  So...  I guess there'd be room for some "creative license".  On the plus side, such a setting does play very nicely with tribes as the autonomous domain unit, which would be fun.

1.5 Mile Hexes

I used to think that people who did sub-6-mile hexes were lunatics!  But it turns out with the right tools, it's actually pretty satisfying to map this way.  Here's a thing I've been working on.

Vale of Traitors, 1.5mile hexes, open in new tab or window to enbiggen

The Simplest Dungeoncrawl

You know, I didn't follow all the way through on the whole "simple option and complex option" notion from last post.  I missed a very important sacred cow which came up in conversation with a friend yesterday.

Maybe painstakingly exploring dungeons square by square is great fun for your group.

But maybe it isn't.  Then what?

Option 1: Don't play low-level OSR D&D.
Option 2: Simplify.

What we have observed with most ACKS dungeoncrawls is this: you go into the dungeon, and go deeper, and fight some stuff, and hopefully find some treasure.  At some point you decide you're done (low on resources or party members) and decide to come back out, at which point you might still get got by wandering monsters.

So what this looks like, stripped down to its essentials, is a linear structure.  Every turn of exploration time, you go deeper into the dungeon or back towards the entrance.  If you go deeper, the DM rolls on his table of "stuff on this dungeon level", slings some flavor text, and maybe you find a thing which you then interact with (wandering or laired monsters, unguarded treasure, traps, stairs down to next level).  If you go back towards the surface, you're passing through territory you've already been in, and the only encounters possible are with wandering monsters, who have no treasure.  Depending on the nature of the dungeon, features may or may not remain consistent between expeditions - the stairs down to level 2 might always be 7 turns of movement from the entrance, for example.

And that's how you run a game which captures the absolute minimal game structure and core strategic risk/reward decisions of the OSR megadungeoncrawl without the details of the structure of the dungeon.  Dungeoncrawling in the theater of the mind's eye.  Admittedly you could expand this to do more general nodecrawl style dungeons - they'd probably arise in play naturally from the linear model, as abilities like sensing evil and sensing treasure might grant advance warning of next zone contents, and permit you to choose a different path forward (towards a desirable outcome) through the implicit high-outdegree dungeon graph.  That would probably be a reasonable and fun compromise position, but this is simpler, and that's the point.

RennFest, Colonial Battlefleet, and Setting Work

Just what it says on the tin:

Had a good time at the Maryland Renaissance Fair(e) this weekend.  Rediscovered mead; much like honeyed whiskey, but with strong overtones of water.  The jousting at German renn faires was better, but this one had elephants and pythons and a cursing well which I am stealing for my upcoming campaign, so hey.

Also picked up a copy of Colonial Battlefleet from the wargame vault today.  Interesting system.  Their initiative mechanic and the roles mechanism are both interesting changes from Starmada, and the fact that they provide a Big List of Weapons should prevent some of the guncheese we had in Starmada: Admiralty. I don't like how they laid out said table (by weapon tonnage, rather than alphabetically by weapon name or weapon 'family'), but that is at least a useful ordering during ship contruction.  Their shields are also very different from S:AE shields (would be interested in seeing some non-forward-focused shields, but I'm happy enough as-is without the extra complexity).  I like the way they handled tech levels, mostly, except for Laser Weaponry, which I think they screwed up with regards to Screen role availability.  One thing that does torque me off a little is some of the really implausible faux science used to justify mechanics that are in place for game balance reasons - things like "When you teleport something, all inorganic chemical reactions in it cease.  As a result, you can only teleport marines, not bombs."  That grinds my gears a bit; you could've just said "You can't teleport bombs because the yield isn't sufficient for a man-sized bomb to damage a starship" (since scale is intentionally vague), or built a bomb-teleporter weapon, or left the players to not think of it like we didn't in six months of Starmada games with teleporter-marines, but no.  Instead you had to make something ridiculous up and call attention to it, which might produce a counter like "OK, that's cool, we're the Tyranids and we're going to build living bomb-marines with organic detonators.  Wheee-BOOM."  That said, upon running a test game against myself with some converted Homeworld ships, it was quick, bloody, reasonable simple, and overall satisfactory.  So if any of the old Starmada Crew is reading this, I'm down for some games over internet (it's hex-based, so should work fine with VTTs).  Fair warning, though - I have been growing out my beard since the weather cooled off... (for those unfamiliar, we observed that gamers with beards were significantly more likely to win at Starmada than were clean-shaven gamers.  The prevailing hypothesis is that this was due to the increase in planning efficiency acquired by stroking one's beard)

Oh yeah.  The editing is not fantastic, and some areas are lacking examples, but the intent of the rules is generally clear, so it's just sort of annoying rather than obstructionary.

Finally, ACKS setting.  Contemplated Wilderlands of High Fantasy, Northern Reaches (Western Marches into mythic Scandinavia), and Midnight in the Late 3rd Age.  Am currently settled on "The Scaled Continent".  The pitch:

In elder days, the children of squamous gods ruled the world, and man, elf, and dwarf suffered beneath their forked and envenomed lash.  But now their empire has fallen to ruin under rebellion and internal strife, and the men of Aura seek the reclaim the treasures that were once stolen from them and taken across the Sea of Tears, to line the jungled halls of the serpent-kings.  From the Isle of Voltager, their settlers and adventurers struggle against the environment, the natives, and sometimes each other for the riches of... the Scaled Continent.

Thematic elements:

• Settings: 
• heavily-trapped temples to bloodthirsty gods
• overgrown and ruined cities of the Old Masters
• human frontier settlements (incl. abandoned and overtaken)
• the Serpent's Tongue (major river)
• sailing ships anchored off the coast
• volcanoes
• Opposition: 
• Lizardmen, frogmen, toadmen, turtlemen, crocodilemen, &c
• With accompanying witch-doctors and guardbeasts
• Prehistoric and/or gigantic beasts 
• yes dinosaurs 
• also giant cockroaches 
• and dire armadillos carrying dire leprosy
• Monsters from South American and/or African myth and ecology
• (some research required, void where inaccurate)
• Dragons 
• Pirates
• Dragon-pirates
• not, however, from Ninja Island
• Screaming river-eels
• Wereleopards (forvalaka)
• Anything with scales that didn't fall into the above categories
• Ambulatory plant life
• Dysentery and worse jungle diseases
• Monsoon season
• Resources:
• Local guides
• Mules
• Dugout canoes
• Treasure maps of dubious veracity
• Steel and alcohol (as trade goods with the natives)
• Gullible henchmen (but when aren't those a resource?)
• Treasure:
• Golden idols
• Crystal skulls
• Rubies the size of a man's fist
• Holy grails?
• Spellbooks containing forgotten and forbidden spells of the reptile mages, written on halfling-skin vellum (demium?)
• Exotic spices and hardwoods
• Rescued slaves
• Cities of gold
• Fountains of youth
• Possible untimely death
• Modules:
• Caverns of Thracia
• DCC#16: Curse of the Emerald Cobra
• A source of fond memories from my youth
• Isle of Dread 
• Temple of the Frog (inasmuch as it is a ruined temple "in the city of the enemy")
• Thematic fiction:
• "Lost World" stories
• Heart of Darkness
• Pulp portrayals of the tropics (eg, King Kong)

 So!  Time to map!  Oh wait, I can just write "JUNGLE" in great big capital letters on a hexmap and be mostly good to go.  Just have to draw a coastline, some islands, a river, and a distant mountain range...

Mapping - Rivers

One difficulty I always have with mapping is determining a reasonable density of rivers.  This provides an interesting answer - when in doubt, more waterways.  Doesn't really show size, but I get the impression that I should never be afraid to throw a creek into a wilderness encounter, or to have ambushers hiding in a dry streambed.

On Mapping

I think I realized how I handled mapping wrong during last session.

The first mistake was giving Tim graph paper instead of blank printer paper.  The second was giving him dimensions of the rooms.  These combined let him generate a more-or-less canonically accurate map with high precision.

For some reason, I get the impression that this isn't how things are supposed to work.  Like PC maps are supposed to be sketchy and iffy, with creating one being an act of artistic interpretation and reading one being an act of intuition and not a little trepidation.  To this end, I think ditching graph paper for players is probably a good first step.  I also think that having a rule of "DM is not permitted to look at player map" would likely help, but that's slightly more extreme.

Thoughts?