I join the self-described UK’s Premiere RPG Podcast,

Armed with “Stunt Baz” Guy Milner off of the Burn After Running blog, this time Gaz interviews RPG producer and designer at Atlas Games, Justin Alexander. The chat covers the excellent RPG resource The Alexandrian, as well as what’s hot at Atlas Games and some great game design discussion.

If you dig actual plays and reviews of played modules, check out the new YouTube channel.

You can check out the podcast here:

What Would the Smart Party Do?

This article is going to make a lot more sense if you’re familiar with:

• the Dragonlance Saga
• Hexcrawls
• Pointcrawls

Dragonlance was created in 1982 by Tracy and Laura Hickman. Tracy and Laura had self-published several D&D modules, which had resulted in Tracy being hired by TSR, Inc. While they were driving from Utah to TSR’s headquarters in Wisconsin, they came up with the idea of an epic series of modules featuring what were, at the time, all twelve types of dragons.

In 1983, TSR’s marketing department identified a common theme in their survey data: Dungeons & Dragons had lots of dungeons, but where were all the dragons? In response, proposals were requested for a dragon-themed project. Two proposals were submitted – one by Tracy Hickman and one by Douglas Niles – and Hickman’s was selected. Under the guidance of Harold Johnson, an all-star team of designers and artists was assembled.

The result was a series of fourteen modules – DL1 through DL14 – consisting of twelve linked adventures, a setting gazetteer (DL5) and a wargame (DL11). These fourteen modules are the original Dragonlance Saga, which gave rise to novels, comics, calendars, miniatures and more.

Hexcrawls are a method of running wilderness adventures. The wilderness is mapped onto a hexmap and content is keyed to each hex. Travel mechanics then determine how the PCs move through the hexmap and when/how they trigger the content keyed to each hex. You can find more information on hexcrawls in the 5E Hexcrawls series.

Pointcrawls are another method of running exploration and travel adventures. A map is prepped with multiple points connected by paths. Content is keyed to each point, and the PCs can maneuver through the pointmap by choosing one of the paths connected to whatever point they’re currently in. Pointcrawls are often used to model wilderness trails, but can have varied applications. You can find more details about pointcrawls here, and there’s an example of a pointcrawl here as part of the Descent Into Avernus Remix.

Hexcrawls, like dungeons, have been around since the earliest days of the hobby. Even before Dungeons & Dragons was published, Dave Arneson was using the hexmap from a game called Outdoor Survival to run wilderness adventures for his Castle Blackmoor campaign.

During the ‘80s, however, unlike dungeons, hexcrawl play slowly withered away. I believe there were a couple reasons for this. First, hexcrawls are not a terribly efficient form of adventure prep. Because you’re keying content to a bunch of different hexes without knowing exactly which hexes a group of PCs might visit, hexcrawls are best suited for scenarios in which the PCs will repeatedly engage with the same chunk of wilderness (so that they’ll encounter different hexes over time).

This makes hexcrawls a great fit for open tables (like Dave Arneson’s Castle Blackmoor or, later, Gary Gygax’s Castle Greyhawk), in which there are multiple groups of PCs exploring the area. But as play increasingly shifted towards dedicated tables (with a smaller number of players who are all expected to attend each session) and plot-based play, it made less and less sense to prep hexcrawls.

For similar reasons, it was difficult for RPG publishers to print fully functional hexcrawls within the constraints of the pamphlet format used for adventure supplements. Very few true hexcrawls were ever published, and those that did see print were never truly complete. TSR, in particular, would usually only print hexmaps with adventure-relevant locations keyed to them (leaving vast swaths of unkeyed territory for the DM to fill in, assuming it even made sense to do so in the first place). So, unlike a dungeon, new DMs couldn’t just pick up a published hexcrawl and run it. They also didn’t have any fully developed examples to base their own designs on.

By 1984-86, when the Dragonlance Saga was published, the industry and hobby were already at a turning point. Although TSR would continue depicting wilderness areas using hexmaps until the early ‘90s, actual hexcrawls were more or less done. (They wouldn’t reappear until the early 21^st century.) It’s interesting, therefore, to look at how the Dragonlance Saga was using hexmaps as an example of this transitional period.

This was even more true because the Dragonlance Saga was a radically experimental project. Not only had nothing of this scope been attempted before, but the Saga was also a massive multimedia experience – not only the famous Chronicles trilogy of novels, but also integration with the BattleSystem™ miniature combat system and a full-fledged wargame. All of this was in service of created an epic fantasy adventure for D&D.

That might seem utterly unremarkable today. (“An epic fantasy campaign for D&D? Of course. Eighteen of them get published every month.”) But this was also something new: Del Rey Books had only recently revealed to the world that LOTR-esque fantasy epics like Terry Brooks’ Sword of Shannara or David Eddings’ Belgariad could be hugely successful, and it was this type of story that Tracy Hickman and the Dragonlance design team wanted to bring to D&D for the first time.

This meant that the designers were also trying to figure out how to do an adventure like this. So they were experimenting with adapting existing adventure design techniques and creating new techniques at the very moment that hexcrawls were dying out.

So when we look at the myriad ways that the Dragonlance Saga used hexmaps, we’re peering into an RPG skunkworks that was grappling with something utterly new and fighting with all of their ingenuity to bring players and DMs a grand experience.. Once we do that, I think we can really appreciate these innovations for what they were, and also learn from them.

REGION CRAWLS

DL1 Dragons of Despair features this hexmap:

At first glance, this sure looks like a hexcrawl. It even features sub-hexes. (The larger, 20-mile hexes are made up of smaller, 1-mile hexes.)

But if you take a closer look, you’ll notice that the map is actually broken up into regions using thin black lines. It’s these regions which are actually keyed.

For example, the entirety of region 33 is keyed as the Kiri Valley:

The forest darkens and thickens beside an ancient trail. A cold, dry stillness hovers in the air, and the trees are knotted and bent. Everything seems to watch you.

An evil wizard died here long ago. Only his essence remains.

This technique allows Hickman’s key to cover the entire map without needing to key content to every individual hex.

If I was redoing this or taking inspiration from this, I would probably ditch the hexes entirely. Although they can be hypothetically helpful in counting out movement, they’re mostly getting in the way and badly impairing the legibility of the map.

(The 20-mile hexes do appear to correspond with a larger map printed in later modules, most notably DL11 Dragons of Glory, which we’ll discuss later. So there might be an argument for keeping those.)

JUST THE MAP, MA’AM

DL2 Dragons of Flame by Douglas Niles features an all-new, full color map of the same area which has also been expanded to the south:

(This is only a sample of the large map, which extends down to a fortress called Pax Tharkas. Oddly the map lists the scale as 1 hex = 2 km, but the hexes align perfectly with the DL1 map.)

This map is an extreme version of many hexmaps that would follow: Rendered using hexes because that had become the expected norm for wilderness maps, but completely divorced from any key or structure that would make the hexmap relevant.

SURPRISE POINTCRAWL

DL3 Dragons of Hope, once again by Tracy Hickman, features a large, unkeyed poster map that unifies the previous hexmaps and then adds a big region to the south of Pax Tharkas (where DL3 takes place).

(Sorry for the poor image quality. Unfortunately, I only have a digital copy of this module and when Wizards scanned the PDF they completely botched it.)

This map seems pretty clearly intended for players, but it’s an odd one. Since DL2 didn’t feature regions, the middle of the map just… doesn’t have them.

The new DL3 regions were keyed on a separate inset map, which looked like this:

As you can see, the hex borders were eliminated. This makes the regions much easier to pick out, but obviously obfuscates the hexes.

The more crucial thing is that, although this looks like it’s meant to be run like the region-crawl in DL1, it’s actually keyed to work like what we would now call a pointcrawl. Here’s an example:

3. Southern Road

The broken remains of an ancient roadway glitter with windswept ice. Here and there, old monuments of stone jut from the frozen ground. Their surfaces are covered with snow-filled runes.

To the south, the way branches. The roadway, mostly covered in snow, turns to the east. To the west is a mountain pass that leaves the road. A set of footprints, short of step, follows the southwest route.

You’re not navigating by hex here. You’re choosing whether to follow the road or the pass and then you’re proceeding to the next keyed encounter along the path you’ve selected.

Go to Part 2

DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 27B: Sights of Venom

Ranthir used his more powerful spell of clairvoyance to peer into the room… and there, standing in the midst of wrecked furniture and miscellaneous debris, he saw two massive, insectoid creatures.

At the sight, he blanched.

As he watched, one of the creatures reached out with its sharp talon and literally drilled the still-drafting curtain into the wall, pinning it in place.

In our last installment of Running the Campaign, we talked about what happens when the PCs miss clues. That actually continues into this section of the session: The project site (i.e., the apartment building controlled by cultists) had been prepped using status quo design. That meant that everything inside the building was basically held in a state of plausible stasis up until the point that the PCs interacted with it.

Once Ranthir cast his clairvoyance spells, therefore, and peeked inside, that status quo was disrupted and events started playing out. One of those events was the argument between members of the Ebon Hand and the Brotherhood of Venom. My anticipation had been that some very important information would get dropped during this conversation (i.e., clues), but because Ranthir was (a) using a spell which only granted sight, not sound; and (b) he couldn’t read lips worth a damn, most of that information was forever lost.

(Well, until the PCs gained it in a different way. Three Clue Rule and all that.)

As you’ll see in future sessions, the decision here to briefly engage the project site (setting events in motion) and then almost immediately withdrawing (“Let’s get out of here.”) had a significant impact on how subsequent events would play out.

But there was also something else the PCs did here that I didn’t expect:

The apartment building being used by the cultists was one of several similar buildings lining Crossing Street. Since Ranthir would only be able to target two specific locations with his spells, they decided to scout out the other buildings to get a better sense of what the layout might be like inside the cult’s building.

This tactic emerged because I have a giant, 8-foot-long map of Ptolus hanging on my wall during sessions, which meant that the players could see exactly what these buildings looked like:

But such a moment could easily arise in any number of ways. The key point here is that the PCs unexpectedly went into a building I had not anticipated them going into.

Now what?

This, of course, is exactly why so many video games nail the doors shut on all the buildings in town.

IN THIS CASE…

In this case, the players’ proposed reason for going into the building conveniently gave me the solution: They hypothesized that the neighboring apartment buildings, although slightly different in size, would have similar floorplans to the project site. I had floorplans for the project site, so it was relatively easy for me to just use those floorplans as the basis for some quick improvisation.

This exact scenario probably won’t crop up that often for you, but the general principle can be more broadly applied: Grab a floorplan you already have prepped — from the current session or perhaps from a previous session — and use it.

Just like these apartment buildings, the similarity of the buildings can be quite diegetic: The world is filled with structures built to a common floorplan.

MAKE IT UP

Obviously the easiest thing for me to say is, “Just make it up.”

Easy to say and great if it works. But improvisation takes practice and, honestly, no matter how much practice you get, there’ll still be times when you come up dry. That’s what the rest of this article is for.

But before we dive into that stuff, a quick word about making it up: Don’t feel like the whole building needs to spring full-blown from your brow like Athena doing Doric cosplay. You can build it up over time, describing only what the PCs need to know at any given moment. As play proceeds, a sketchy understanding of the building will start filling in with details.

A few thoughts on this:

• The first thing you’re likely to need is the exterior of the building. What’s the first thing that pops into you head when you think of the building? Describe that.
• If it’s a tactical situation, a key thing here will be entrances (do more than one) and windows.
• The second thing is to think about why the PCs are interested in the building: They’ll have probably already told you. (They’re looking for the CEO’s office. Or they’re trying to get to the roof. Or they want to hack the mainframe.) Roughly speaking, where is that stuff? First floor? Basement? Top floor?
• Once they pick an entrance, describe the lobby or front room or kitchen or whatever it is they see when they go through that door.
• Once again, think about where the exits are and start getting a sketchy feeling for where they might lead (with some thought for how they might connect to the PCs’ goals).

And then proceed along those lines.

But it also doesn’t have to be that complicated!

It’s very often true that you don’t actually need a floorplan at all.

For example, if the PCs have come here to meet with the CEO, you don’t need to know the whole building. In fact, you can probably just cut straight to a scene in the CEO’s office.

On the other hand, if you do need a floorplan and you need it right now (it’s a tactical situation, you’re playing with a VTT, etc.), then you can…

GOOGLE IT

Just hit up a search engine and type in whatever building type you’re looking for plus “blueprints” or “floorplans.”

This tends to work most reliably with modern buildings, but adding “fantasy” or “science fiction” to the search can often pull up what you need. (More reliably with the former than the latter.) These days if you add “RPG,” too, you’re likely to get a full-blown battlemap more often than not.

BUILD YOUR STOCK

Instead of scrambling with image searches at the table, you can get ahead of the game by building up a supply of stock floorplans for common locations.

• 4 or 5 different houses
• 2 or 3 warehouses
• 3 or 4 offices buildings
• A shopping mall

That sort of thing.

You can make a big push to assemble this in a marathon prep session, but it’s also something you can slowly build up over time: When you prep an adventure with a house, for example, tuck the floorplan for that house into the accordion folder or computer directory where you’re keeping your generic stock of floorplans. Over time you’ll just sort of accrete what you need.

Either way, you’ll slowly develop a sense of exactly what type of floorplans you’re likely to need, and that knowledge can often transfer from one setting to another. (As can many of the floorplans, in fact. Particularly if they don’t need to be seen by the players.)

RANDOM FLOORPLANS

Another option is to use a random generator to create the floorplan you need on-the-fly.

If you poke around a bit, you can find a number of online generators, like this Random Inn Generator from Inkwell Ideas. Collect these links in your digital notes and you can get something like this with the press of a button:

Personally, I prefer a more generic generator that I can use with just dice-and-paper. You can find the tool I use in my article on Streetcrawling Tools. It provides enough of a scaffold that I can iterate the rest, but is generic enough that I generally only need the one tool. That way I don’t feel overwhelmed hunting for precisely the right tool if my stock of generic floorplans doesn’t have exactly what I’m looking for.

It’s sort of the multitool of, “Oh crap, my players just went into a random building!”

NEXT:
Campaign Journal: Session 27C – Running the Campaign: Playing to the Crowd
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

Our Let’s Read of the original 1974 edition of D&D continues as we delve deeper into Volume 1: Men & Magic. Topics covered in this video include:

• Spellcasting
• Turning undead
• Six levels of magic-user spells
• Five levels of cleric spells

If you want to start watching from the beginning, you can do that here.

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