Gygax 75 Challenge

[terse cloak]

Hey guys! I'm writing this post to see if anyone else would like to join this challenge written by Ray Otus based on a Gary Gygax article in 1975.

https://plundergrounds.itch.io/gygax75

The idea is that you take 5 weeks (or quicker!) to create a campaign setting step by step. 1st step is to create a pitch and put down some inspirations for that pitch, and 2nd step would be to build the surrounding area.

I am experiencing a bit of writers block since I have an idea but can't really mould it the way I want to, and was wondering if anyone else wants to join in and help if they also have writers block!

[terse cloak]

Alright, today marks Week 1!

If you want to join me in this, we will talk amongst ourselves for week 1, and post what we have next Saturday. I expect y'all to read the booklet, but I will put the steps that are required for Week 1 in here!

Tasks

• Get/Create a notebook (whether physical or digital)

• Develop your pitch (3-7 well crafted bullet points to sell your world)

• Gather your 7 sources of inspiration (List them and provide a sentence or two explaining what each source brings). Make sure they're 7 only!

**Extra Credit **(If you finish everything else)

• Create a mood board

• Practice your pitch!

[grim current]

The sources are the hard part. Especially if you haven't seen the thing you're trying to make.

[terse cloak]

True! That’s why you have a week!

[craggy mountain]

and assistance!

[terse cloak]

So here is what I have so far!!!

• Portals exist in this world. Some Kingdoms have them and some don’t. The ones that do keep them very secret and use it to provide them with resources and extra power for their magic users. The extra strength of these magic users are military secrets. Portals also pop up randomly in the world and exist for 1m to 7 days.

• Technology did exist in this world 10k yrs ago (Chrono Trigger style Tech? Futuristic Gravity Style Tech?) However, when portals opened up, monsters started to eat the technology as the power source fed them, and when that ran out they ate people. This led people to be in isolated villages, while cities popped up medieval style to keep out the monsters or to protect a portal that gave them extra magic.

• You’re from a small village and have either heard of the portals and want to see what they are, or you found a portal and it gave you magic powers. You can also leave your village because of hearing of riches or opportunities in these vast lands.

• 10k yrs ago there was only once common ancestry. However because of the portals that popped up, they mutated people close to them, and distinct ancestries developed from there. All the different fantasy creatures have some sort of common story of how their ancestors were mutated by the portal magic and became who they are today. All fantasy races exist as a result of this. Orcs/Goblins those sorts of “evil” races came from the portals.

• Gods from other planes have power in this world specifically from the portals. Kingdoms have created religions based on this, and have brought their missionaries far across the world, which has culminated in Clerics and Priests that worship different gods across the land.

• The world is dangerous and the villages are isolated from each other. It takes a daring adventurer or someone with bold entrepreneurial skills to want to go out into the world and explore dungeons and ruins, and seek the Kingdoms that influence the land.

I don’t wholly love it and I don’t know why!!! I think it’s whether or not I want to deconstruct the idea of portals existing in kingdoms and their size and importance

[grim current]

Fun. If orcs and goblins came from another world, that suggests the existence of portals that lead to another world(s), yes?

Also, are portals open all the time, or does operating them require complex operation, possibly dangerous to the operator?

[grim current]

I put my stuff in a Google doc, hope that's okay. It's decidedly smaller scope, as the current area is just a small portion of a country that has been separated. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1O9-gXXsCh9ZVMvJWBVHBHk7plWjNwqD0axc3JHKyFvI/edit?usp=drivesdk

[terse cloak]

Can’t access your google document so I requested access!

I like the idea of portals having the ability to randomly pop up in this world but keeping a portal open should be a difficult endeavour.

Yes! Planescape and its portals are a huge influence, so they do go to different places!

[grim current]

Okay fixed, managing docs from mobile is new for me

[terse cloak]

I enjoy the idea of mountains having shifted, and a mist basically resetting the landscape every day. Do you think people would be too scared to go in?

[grim current]

Yes, it has disappeared a couple of small armies, including the kings. The PCs can choose how to investigate.

[terse cloak]

Cool!

[craggy mountain]

Here's my draft bullets

Basic Principles
• This is a world where, currently, nothing is “great” – no great empires, no great wars, no great heroes, and no great fortunes. The former age was one where all these things existed, but that world broke against itself. Today, people don’t even live in the shadow of those times. They are vague memories, but more often myths and legends.
• For two or three generations, people (humans and demi-humans) are getting on with their lives, living simply, and mostly freely in a mix of small communities, some ruled by minor lords or “guild”-like collectives. Large patches of wilderness exist between many of these communities, and many of these wildernesses hide the remnants and ruins of things of the past.
• Increasingly, younger people are beginning to see this world as an opportunity, a kind of a void in which one might make something of themselves, much to the displeasure of the older generations.
• You (the PCs), however, are just a bunch of goblins who were born yesterday in a mushroom-filled swamp. Today, you and your brood-kin found an old book filled with many “great” things – great empires, great wars, great heroes, and great fortunes. You can’t read it, of course, but the pictures are so very evocative! What excitement might lie beyond the swamp? With little other than some scraps of armor and weapons that you’ve fashioned (probably out of trash), you scramble out of the swamp and into the world.

[terse cloak]

Oh man that sounds fantastic

What inspires it?

[craggy mountain]

Well, what inspired me was a combination of four things: some OSE modules, these adventures by Slowquest called "The Goblings," and the Halls of Arden Vul. But it's kind of an intersectional inspiration. Like, take this whimsical kind of idea that you're a goblin and set it in an otherwise kind of bog-standard fantasy adventure so that you get a kind of inverse exploration game. Usually the humans leave civilizaton and go into the wilderness, but if you're a weird goblin, then civilization is your wilderness.

[terse cloak]

Sounds like the three of us are the ones that are participating. Maybe we all move on to round 2?

[faint wigeon]

I'm down to participate as well, I've been meaning to get to work on a setting I've had floating around my head for a while. Just give me a moment to collect my thoughts into bullet points

[terse cloak]

Oh cool! I’ll wait the whole week then!

[faint wigeon]

• The world is breaking. The god who defines and controls the fundamental order of the continent has been without influence for too long, and what is left of it’s system is breaking down as circumstances continue to change over the centuries without being regulated by a proper system. It will be up to the heroes to claim the Formless Throne and bring their version of order to the world.
• Everything is inundated with metal. Rivers, streams and seas have been replaced by quicksilver, mountains of copper and bronze cast burnished light over the lands, trees of gold purified by the light of the sun stand barren in scorched fields.
• The Royal family is engaged in a shadowy civil war amongst themselves due to mysterious circumstances. Players will learn how betrayal strikes those at the top of society and what ruin can be wrought when demigods experience heartbreak.
• The heavens are abnormal. The moon has been gripped in a terrible spell, held still over a single kingdom of eternal night. The sun is in an alliance with a barony in the East, a deadly celestial weapon wielded by a madman.
• Blood has value. When the world was formed, Eternal Queen Sigretta was gifted blood of purest silver. Deemed the perfect color, she decreed to her subjects that all blood has power, and the closer to her perfect silver blood it is, the more valuable it shall be. The economy runs not on coins, but on the very lifeblood of the people’s veins.
• The player characters are Bloodless. Deemed guilty of some high crime, they were sentenced to a fate worse than execution, a cursed half-life buried in a tomb without the blessed blood that runs through all worthy living things. Unbeknownst to anyone, the practice of Great Bloodletting confers a form of immortality. Awakening from the crumbling ruins of your once-great empire, what has changed in your unknowable centuries of restless slumber?

hopefully this formatting isnt too terrible

[terse cloak]

That’s pretty cool, any vampiric inspiration?

[faint wigeon]

Some for sure

Inspirations are mostly Elden Ring and Bloodborne, with a lot of Alchemical philosophy thrown in for the metals bits

The plane of Mirrodin from MTG is a lot of inspo as well

I couldnt really nail down what exact vampire media I'm pulling those themes from but i think a lot of it is from Innistrad

[terse cloak]

Mirrodin was such a cool setting, just a “metal” world. That’s cool!

Should have Glissa Sunseeker as an NPC that pops in randomly much like Drizz’t does

[faint wigeon]

I do lke glissa

maybe she"ll get an expy

[terse cloak]

Everybody’s ideas have inspired me to refine my idea! I think that the portals are going to bring in different places as well into the existence of this realm, firstly so I can use any module I want in my world without modifying the story side too much, and also to stuff in cool stuff even if it doesn’t really “fit” realistically into the worlds consistency

That being said, wonder if I should restrict it to tombs and dungeons and random smaller places, or maybe larger castles and ciities and towns???

I wonder if I’m going to far past the first week lmao

[faint wigeon]

I do think you may run the risk off too many cooks in the kitchen

But having little slivers of other places for dungeons and small stories is a cool way to spice things up

[terse cloak]

That’s very true

I’ll keep it to dungeons and tombs

[grim current]

I think with a concept like yours, with nations having and using the portals, you'll need to define how and why the portals open and how they are restricted so that you don't have to rethink every aspect of life in those nations. for instance, if one nation was able eo send a massive army through, they would potentially be able to conquer a place on the other side of the world w/o having to travel between. Essentially living on a different map than the rest of the world. they would be able to import resources from this new area, and if on the same plane/planet be able to launch attacks against their enemies.
Which is fine, but you should define if they are in fact controlled by "nations" or by powerful noble houses, or by single mad wizaards or what. Also, are these portals defined by a solid structure like minecraft or stargate, or more of a place where a wormhole opens up in empty space.

[craggy mountain]

you could tweak the portals so that they’re harder to use to such ends

some/all are one way, sometimes they have a time delay for transit, some wont transmit certain materials, etc

some only work under condition of transposition

[faint wigeon]

I don't think you necessarily have to, a portal is a very easily defensible position

Depending on how wide the portal is, a single wall of fire glyph can hold an entire army back

And if you make them so heavily defended that all modern generals have given up on trying to assault through one, you can make it a huge deal if the BBEG uses his army on one and succeeds somehow

[grim current]

Assuming both sides know where the portals is. Imagine if the Nazis discovered a portal in the german Alps that led to an onion cellar of a house a few miles outside of London, and Britan was unawares. Things might be different today.

[faint wigeon]

That is assuming that both kingdoms know about the portals. Based on his description the portals seem relatively rare and dangerous though, considering they output a massive magical signature, mutate life around them, and often lead to dangerous planes that spawn evil creatures. I assume that they aren't the most subtle things most times.

[craggy mountain]

oh sure, it depends on how you want the portals to work. If you want them to be these intense areas focus and they’re all basically like DMZs, then that’s OK. However, that might have the effect of making them a kind of static feature of the world that shapes how the world works, but ultimately might not affect the PCs specifically.

[faint wigeon]

Then again, there certainly is the possibility that an evil kingdom or wizard could secretly build power over time there and then lauch a campaign against everything around him, but that sounds like a fun story

[grim current]

Right. If this is how you're defining the portals, and have checks and balances, then ya, you're good. From what I read above, it wasn't clear how you were checking them. 👍

[faint wigeon]

I guess it all does really depend on how Zensei imagines the portals. When you get a little abstract, a portal can look like a surprising amount of things that function in very different ways

[terse cloak]

This explains why I have been having so much problem with my world idea when it comes to the portals. I'm realising I need to put more thought into this, because it really does define how the rest of the society works in a consistent manner.

Since I've been further developing this idea, I think I have a decent idea of how the portals work.

Essentially in the past they were huge static portals that went to other planes of existence and brought in different ancestries, monsters that destroyed the technological age, and brought in magic/extra magic, and mutated things around them. This was a big event 10k yrs ago. The portals are the size of one average human, so 5 something feet in diameter

The portals also do not lead anywhere to the same place in this world. They are interdimensional and not local. Definitely more wormholes, and thats why it takes a lot of energy to keep one open that isn't a known static one.

The "big" portals have weakened over time and so anything on the other side has no real interest in coming here.

Maybe I should overthink it and have each portal and the plane it came from define the kingdom that built up around it. Maybe the people on the other side have decided to come over and do the same thing people from this realm do, but it was long ago. And thats why they build these dungeons and tombs that became ruins and ancient sites.

I contemplated the resource gathering from other planes, but have decided ultimately it's only magic that really comes through at this point in the world. Otherwise it would definitely redefine how society works

[craggy mountain]

to me, the most important question is how you want the portals to affect the PCs. Like, are the portals just a feature of the world or are they a feature of the game?

[terse cloak]

A feature of the world, if it was to be a feature of the game we’d be in sigil

.. That helps quite a bit actually

[craggy mountain]

Putting it that way really clarifies things for me, certainly

[terse cloak]

Yeah thank you for asking that question!

I’m glad that Zenerift came in and helped stop my hastiness, this is going to make the bullet points much better

[faint wigeon]

No problem

[grim current]

Glad we waited too, next steps are to make a map, and I'm terrible with maps. How far is a mile in terms of fantasy adventure?

[craggy mountain]

Are you planning to do 5e? Starting at level 1?

My view is that there are two very different but equally good ways to approach the distance problem. (1) Do it from a PoV which totally prioritizes "realism" or (2) Do it from the PoV of how far apart things should "feel" for the PCs.

I think it ends up being the case that 1 & 2 often yield the same results, save for cases where you are building a very specific kind of world where things like population density are an important worldbuilding concern.

[terse cloak]

Also depends on whether you’re doing exploration heavy style adventures as well

[craggy mountain]

Yes, exactly!

[terse cloak]

The map for a hexcrawl is different from a map for a narrative first game

[craggy mountain]

(Like, is this Forbidden Lands)

If you're in a bog standard fantasy world (i.e. fake europe / UK), then towns are going to here and there, every 3-10 miles aka less than a day's journey away. If you want to make things more remote and isolated and you're working in 5e, just start adding increments of ~25 miles (which is a days journey at a normal pace).

[grim current]

I had 5e in mind, but the "Gygax 75" has some specific rules for maps, so I was going to try and follow that. But I might just go with a narrative map, and portion out the exact distances as it becomes important to the story.

[craggy mountain]

For sure! If you're doing a 1 mile hex map, then the "realistic" answer might be to have a settlement every few hexes (in relation to one another) with other areas of "wilderness" and then build the totality of the map in terms of some kind of narrative unit based on how much travel you think the game might be about.

[terse cloak]

I am also going to put this world through the ringer of Worlds Without Numbers worldbuilding exercise as well after all of this!

That has a big part on maps as well

[faint wigeon]

I'm also terrible with maps, but I tend to kind of handwave distances between towns as "how many days will it take to get there"

I think most of the towns in my setting are going to be destroyed or overrun, with a usable one every 3-4 days of travel or so

[craggy mountain]

It's much more important to know travel times than it is to know travel distances. (You can always convert times to distances anyway.)

[terse cloak]

I have finally did a final rough draft of my pitch:

• Portals exist in this world. Some Kingdoms have them and some don’t. The ones that do tend to keep them very secret and use it to provide them with resources and extra power for their magic users. The extra strength of these magic users are a military secret. Portals also pop up randomly in the world and exist for usually one minute. You cannot enter them unless you want to kill yourself. To keep it open a magic user must use part of their soul along with their magic ability. It drains them to the point of reducing their lifespan.

• Technology did exist in this world 10,000yrs ago. When portals opened up to the world, monsters started to eat the technology as its power source fed them, and when that ran out they started to eat anything in sight, including people. This has led people to be in isolated villages, while cities started popping up medieval style to keep out the monsters or to protect a portal. This makes monsters attracted to magic and a large amount of creatures meant they came from a portal or feel the residual magic of one.

• You are from a small village and have heard of portals as these myths, as news doesn't travel fast. Monsters roam the areas surrounding the village keeping you isolated, however merchants and other daring traders do come through. You may be a magic user from being born near a portal and it's residual magic came from you.

• 10k yrs ago there was only once common ancestry. However because of the portals that popped up, they mutated people close to them, and distinct ancestries developed from there. All the different fantasy creatures have some sort of common story of how their ancestors were mutated by the portal magic and became who they are today. All fantasy races exist as a result of this. Orcs/Goblins those sorts of “evil” races came from the portals.

• Gods from other planes have power in this world specifically from the portals that have been kept open. The Kingdoms have to sacrifice magic users which means that most religions are death cults, but there are 1 or 2 gods that don't want the sacrifice and ask for magical monsters or evil magic users to be sacrificed instead.

I now call this world Pyli, which is Greek for Gate. This means that most names of things are going to be Greek or have Greek roots

[faint wigeon]

I like the changes made, and the name is cool. If the person who used their soul to keep to portal open dies, does the portal close within 1 minute?

[terse cloak]

That I don't know. I feel logistically that the portal's residual magic is what really matters and that lasts for a long time, otherwise they're sacrificing every day. So a portal's residual magic is good for one year per minute open, and a sacrifice opens it up for another minute

That also means it would be a yearly ritual

[faint wigeon]

Gotcha, makes sense to me

[terse cloak]

Thanks for clarifying! This stuff really helps solidify the world so that the rules are consistent

[terse cloak]

Alright guys, today is the start of Week 2!

This week is all about creating a map of the surrounding area.

I think that aspect is really important because yesterday I was messing around with hex map creators and realised that setting the scale of the hexes is uber important to the rest of the map. I'll add the scale part here:

If your hex paper contained 23x14 hexes, a scale of 1 mile to 1 hex
would represent an area equal to 322 mi² – about half the size of
greater London. A 1:6 scale would represent 12,432 mi², roughly a
third the size of Ireland. You may be tempted to ‘go big’ but the goal is
to define one area in which characters can adventure. You don’t need
to map the whole world. Scales any larger than 6 miles per hex
should be dismissed out of hand. There will be time to draw a larger
scale map in week 5. A lot can be done with just a few hexes!

I found that mildly confusing and not what I was looking for. They're not exactly clear on what the scale should be but said it should be less than 6 miles per hex. The Alexandrian does it with 12 miles, but that goes against the spirit of this particular world building exercise.

This leads to this quote

Gygax suggests “sitting down with a large piece of hex ruled paper
and drawing a large scale map. A map with a scale of 1 hex = 1 mile
… will be about right for player operations such as exploring,
camping, adventuring, and eventually building their strongholds. Even
such small things as a witch's hut and side entrances to the dungeon
can be shown on the map. The central features of the map must be the
major town and the dungeon entrance.” 

I think that forgetting to make it look pretty and really focussing on the following tasks is important. Add the tasks first, and then build the region around it!

• Get a sheet of hex paper. Draw the following items on it. Name
  anything worthy of a name. If you don't feel comfortable drawing,
  lots of hex-mapping programs are available! I’m fond of Hex Kit
  by Negative Cone of Energy.

• One large settlement (define large however you like)

• Two other settlements (camps, larger or smaller towns, a keep, the
  home base of a fantasy race, etc.)

• One major terrain feature (covering at least three hexes)

• One mysterious site for exploration

• One dungeon entrance – at least!

• Key your map. The easiest way to do this is probably to number
  the hex rows and letter the columns. This will give you
  coordinates to reference. Note down the names of places and
  terrain types using these coordinates or write them directly on the
  map.

• Create a random encounters table. Make a 2d6 table (11 slots
  numbered 2-12). Put the least dangerous/most common
  encounters in the middle of the table and the rarest ones at the top
  and bottom of the list. Consider making a few of the encounters
  interesting NPCs. I also suggest including adventure hooks, like
  “2d4 goblins looting the corpse of a dead noble” instead of just
  writing “2d4 goblins.”

I will be using Worldographer for my hex map and if anyone else is, maybe we can collaborate to make this work!

[grim current]

Ya, I think lots of this is more prescriptive of how you're going to run a campaign also. This feels very old school: Here is a village in the wilderness, go forth and explore, vs some more modern campaigns where more options are available. For me, I have three major avenues I see this game going and only one invovles being on the edge of the civilized world exploring and operating out of a base village or similar.
But, one of them does, so we'll flesh that avenue out!

Also, being American, it's hard to think about entire countries as "only" as big as England. Illinois, is bigger than England, and we never had entire "kingdoms" fighting each other (at least not recorded) So it's sometimes hard to think that all this cool stuff could be so close to each other.

[terse cloak]

That’s true, definitely a different way of thinking about things. However if you think out the first 13 colonies, Philly vs New York vs Washington is three different cultures under the same region, three different kingdoms that have similar values but decide to interpret them differently you know?

[craggy mountain]

yeah, thinking about it in terms of early America ends up working out just fine

it’s easy to imagine fights between colonist and indigenous people in North America as being kingdoms at war

[terse cloak]

Man I feel terrible for not thinking about the indigenous people as well, and yeah they would also be a kingdom. The elves that protect the forest and are pissed off at the humans who have moved into the grasslands

[terse cloak]

Rough draft of my first map!

Hex Map Key:

000.006

Fountain of Lamneth, in the swamp land at the edge of the sea

001.004

Village of Lypimen. Population of 50, surrounded by lush forest, with the grasslands to the north

004.000

Metsakunin .Home of the wood elves. They protect the forest to the east all the way to the mountains. The dead forest brings them great pain

004.006

Kentriko. City of trade that provides goods for the rest of the region that is small. Provides mostly for itself but is rich as it brings the gems and minerals from the mountains and trades with the rest of the world via the sea. Population 10,000. Flat lush farmland surrounds the town, and it is by the mouth of the river that runs deep.

006.004

Gate of Taxidi. Some say magic still exists here as it used to be a portal.
Monsters have been appearing more around lately...

006.001

Dungeon in the dead forest of the wood elves

007.007

Dwarven abandoned mine

008.003

Portal

008.008

Choraj, city of the dwarves. They mine to the east of their home

[grim current]

Nice, I'm doing a similar map but flipped e/w, yours looks nicer than mine. What is the approximate hex size?

[terse cloak]

Hex Width: 75 Pixels
Hex Height: 56.25 Pixels

Hex Orientation: Rows Line Up

[grim current]

Sorry, I meant what is the scale of the map. 1 Mile? 3 miles?

[terse cloak]

3 mile hexes!

About 5km. I basically went into google maps and started doing line distances with my home so I could get a sense of walking distances and it helped a lot

[grim current]

Oooh, that's a great idea.
What's your address, so I can do the same? (kidding, I make joke. Funny no?)

[terse cloak]

lmao

666 Hell Ave, Sydney Australia 😛

[grim current]

Puts some perspective on "how far would I travel to raid a gravesite"

[terse cloak]

hahahaha yeah

I decided to put in 2 dungeons.... I realise how that might be a lot of work lmao. I'm going to steal from old modules for those dungeons and make some narrative tweaks to make sense in this world

[craggy mountain]

i plan to fully steal all my hexes

[terse cloak]

Understandable

I find at this scale it’s hard to add something everywhere and I have so many things I want to shove into this map haha

[grim current]

This is a tough week. I imagine lots of us have a vague idea what the landscape should look like, but actually putting it in map form is more difficult than it sounds.

[craggy mountain]

yeah ive had like no “fun” computer time

is there a good mobile friendly hex tool?

[terse cloak]

https://hextml.playest.net/

that might work?

[craggy mountain]

hmmmmmm!

[craggy mountain]

do you know how to turn on numbers?

[terse cloak]

I have no idea how to use that software

I just googled “hexmap + editor + mobile”

[craggy mountain]

hahaha word

if i can figure out keying it seems great

[grim current]

Heres mine. I hate it, but it does kinda represent what's going on.

Done in Hextml. To turn on numbers, there is a button on the left side of the map, looks like an L, it's x/y axis.

[terse cloak]

I completely understand the hate, I also hate mine but it's about funcitonality right

What's the scale?

[grim current]

I think 2 miles. It's a local regional map. The big capital is several days travel to the east, and the mountains to the west are the shifting terrain in my overview.

[terse cloak]

Nice

[grim current]

See map.

7.3 - Main Settlement: Thornwall. Medium/Small settlement inhabited mostly by humans, with some halfling, orc and dwarven families.

5.3 - Ruins: Dwarven City. Much iconography to Kols - The Oath Keeper. The Surface is overrun with all manner goblins, trolls and ogres. Who knows what is below?

6.7 - Fortification. A basic but defendable wooden fort was set up here when the mountains first moved. It has been stationed for years with a garrison and studies the mountains and protects the land. The garrison is now but a few soldiers.

4.8 - Eternal Tower. A keep on the edge of the mountains, every day as the mists clear, there is one feature in this area that does not change. A tower or keep will be present at this site. Different styles and forms it takes, and rarely is there any sign of life save for a few times than a candle in a window was visible.

8.6 - Ruins: City of dead. A strange city, with unusual architecture. Elven or Dwarven or other, unknown but it combines both symbols similar to Elves, Dwarves and other races, but nothing that matches exactly. During the day travel is hazardous because of the strange way the city was built one can easily get lost or fall down a hole to a basement or sewer. At night unspeakable nightmarish creatures manifest.

12.10 - Halfling settlement.

Western Mountains. Chaos Hills / Chaos Mountains, whatever you call them, they are certainly a main feature of this area and to the province to the east. They are very similar to the appalachian mountains in size, and very difficult to pass. Each morning the early morning fog appears and the mountain landscape changes, people creatures and places still in the mountainous region go missing or come back changed. Ogres, Giants and even a dragon are said to have been seen in these mountains.

[terse cloak]

Hells yeah I like the key

I decided to reinstate my inkarnate subscription because I hate the look of the other map maker

So will be redoing my map! They have a hex feature

[grim current]

I'm learning to like hextml and my map... it's much better when it's zoomed in a bit. No perfect, but okay. Looking ahead to this week's assignment. Should be fun, but looks like some work ahead.

[terse cloak]

That’s understandable! For now I have a working map so I’m not gonna change it, just make it prettier lmao

[terse cloak]

Alllllllright Everybody! It is Week 3!!!!!!!!

That means that it's time to build a Dungeon

So I know that the hexmap was a not the easiest but we did it, and the dungeon may not be the easiest either, ubut just doing the tasks I think will make life a lot easier!!!

• Describe the entrance to the Dungeon in 7-10 Words

• Create a point to point map, much like a diagram!

• Draw 3 levels, for each level, include at least d6+6 rooms/areas and connect them

• Come up with one theme per level

• Make a list of about a dozen iconic monsters and place them in rooms/areas

• Spread d6 major features throughout the dungeon

• For each room/area, note any treasure

• Name three wondrous items and locate them in the dungeon

• Spend any remaining them budget adding detail

Yeah! Any questions, let me know!

[terse cloak]

Hahah it’s quiet in here, Including me. This is a tough one!

[grim current]

Yup. I think this is another example of differences in the play styles. I have a setting/module from an old pathfinder booklet for a town and dungeon that takes the characters to level 3. it's a single floor, but I'll probably use that.
Where the difference is, is any serious dungeon that I would plan on using would be specifically flavored towards one or more of the party's goals or backgrounds. So it's difficult for me to try and plan this far in advance regarding a 3 or more level dungeon. But having just written that, I think I have some ideas now. 🙃 but yes, this task is a bit thicker than the previous one. The map was just something I didn't WANT to do, this i requiring me to actually "work" through it.

[terse cloak]

Haha understandable!

To me the dungeon is what they make of it, but I understand your playstyle

[grim current]

Ya, but as I was writing that, I think I have some inspiration and can tie it (loosely) to the problem mountain range. I got a bunch of stuff going on in my head, but stupid work getting in the way of all my productive dungeon-making. I'll probably forget most of this by the end of the day. Not cool.

[grim current]

I don't know about anyone else, but this task is taking longer than a week for me. I've got themes and doing some research on monsters that I haven't used yet. I did not want to just throw a bunch of angry hit points in a cave. Are we cool with extending, or is anyone else anxious to push Forward?

Actually, I just read week 4, and I'm stealing my town whole cloth, so I've got an extra week anyway. I'm good with whatever.