The Bonehoard

While playtesting the ruleset I'm working on I ran into some hiccups with overland movement rates. Frequent changes between terrain types caused my simplistic "3 hexes for plains, 2 for forests, etc" rules to not flow as nicely as I'd wish. The multipliers I was using could also combine a bit too extremely, and flat bonuses felt wrong at lower rates where mountains would proportionally benefit far more than plains, for example. Here's the system I came up with as a result - it has worked nicely in my tests thus far. It requires a bit of math though. Nothing hard, but fair warning in case math is especially difficult for you. This is for 3-mile hexes. Cost is how much it costs to enter the hex, from a per-watch budget of 60. Hexes per watch given for ease of reference. A watch is four hours, and they can travel without penalty for two watches a day. 3 watches = Tired, 4 = Exhausted, 5+ = make Grit/Con checks at increasing penalty. For each degree of ease, move one ...

Back from the dead! I'm fixin' to finally run a wilderness hexcrawl that I'm very excited about, and am refining some procedures prior to play. I figured I'd document some of the prep here, in case it's useful to others! After looking at some great examples of modified encounter checks but not quite finding what I wanted, I decided to incorporate some of the general ideas and formulate my own mechanic. The Hazard System and the Underclock were large inspirations to this. Goals : Allow for surprises, both good and bad. Sometimes create suspense. Have no "null" results. Have higher results be better, to allow modifiers to the roll depending on conditions. Roll 2d6: [Spoor (SP) starts at 0] 2: Bigger Encounter (surprise). Reset SP to 0 3: Regular Encounter. Reset SP to 0 4: SP > 0? Encounter. Else, SP+1 5: SP > 1? Encounter. Else, SP+1 6: SP > 2? Encounter. Else, SP+1 7:  SP > 0? SP+1. Else, Challenge 8: Flavor, SP-1 9:  Minor Resource (if ...