As described in The Art of the Key, the first published module for D&D was Palace of the Vampire Queen. It used a very simplistic, tabular key:

A year later, Judges Guild would release Wilderlands of High Fantasy, the first published hexcawl. This book keyed only a fraction of the hexes on its map, also using mostly tabular methods:

Different table formats were presented for Lurid Lairs (above), Villages, and Citadels & Castles.

These tablular entries are supplemented with short, one or two sentence entries like these:

1002-Above Ground Ruined Temple-3 Windwalkers

2822-Overgrown Antique Paintings-Copper Dragon

1418 Isle of Grath – Abode of four huge Ogres which relish human flesh. Every Ogre has three eyes, and flaming red hair. A pet giant crocodile follows them to feast on the leavings.

(“Overgrown Antique Paintings” is just a typo. Based on the format of other entries, it should be specifying an overgrown something in which antique paintings are the treasure to be looted from a copper dragon. The image it conjures of a copper dragon living inside magical antique paintings that one can presumably enter is just too fantastic for me not to call it out here. But I digress.)

But whereas the published presentation of dungeons has significantly developed and improved over the last 40+ years, the presentation of hexcrawls largely has not. If you pick up virtually any of the OSR hexcrawls released over the past few years, you’ll still find:

Incomplete keys, in which lots of hexes aren’t keyed at all. This is generally an indication that your hexcrawl is at the wrong scale. This creates two problems in actual play. First, it tends to create very poor pacing (with long spans of time in which navigational decisions are not resulting in interesting feedback in the form of content). Second, the lack of content equates to a lack of structure. One obvious example of this is that hexcrawls with vast spans of empty space lack sufficient landmarks in order to guide navigation.

Underdeveloped keys that aren’t ready for actual play. Telling me that there is, for example, a dungeon in a particular hex with “Hobgoblins 42” in it doesn’t actually give me any meaningful information for bringing that dungeon into play.

Perhaps the most egregious example of this sort of thing are products like Carcosa, which feature keys almost entirely generated by rolling on the random stocking tables found in the back of the book and jotting down the result. There’s zero value in such a key. Why? Because you could just as easily roll on the random stocking tables yourself.

Transitory keys, in which the content keyed to a hex is something you only encounter once and then the hex is functionally empty the next time you go there. (For example, from Isle of the Unknown, “A 9^th-level cleric… in a red surcoat with a white cross rides southeast to take ship upon a holy pilgrimage.”) Because this content effectively deletes itself from the key, over time this transitory content turns even a complete key into an incomplete one. It should instead be encoded as a random encounter (or similar structure).

SO WHAT?

Why is this a problem?

Well, imagine if we designed dungeons this way.

THE TOMB OF SAGRATHEA

Level 1: 12 skeletons.

Level 2: The original laboratories of the lich Sagrathea, now divided into a tribe of 17 ghost eaters and a kingdom of 46 skeletons locked in war with each other.

Level 3: The walls of the Bloodpool Labyrinth are of pinkish flesh which bleeds a grease-like substance if injured. There are many traps here. Patrolled by 2 flaming skulls.

Level 4: [intentionally left blank]

Level 5: [intentionally left blank]

Level 6: 121 skeletons + 4 ogre skeletons.

Level 7 – Sagrathea’s Gardens: A collection of 27 caverns each rendered as a miniature biome. Sagrathea has recorded his spellbook in these gardens, with each garden cavern recording a single spell of the 4^th to 9^th level of potency.

Level 8 – Sagrathea’s Manse: The lich Sagrathea sits upon a throne of black stone with his wight bride.

You can add in a side-view illustration of the dungeon showing each level’s vertical elevation, but if you can imagine looking at this dungeon “key” and being asked to run the Tomb of Sagrathea, then you know how I generally feel when I open up a typical hexcrawl and see the “key” inside.

There’s a real “draw the rest of the fucking owl” vibe to it.

WHAT SHOULD A HEXCRAWL LOOK LIKE?

Published hexcrawls are, in my opinion, providing a poor example of the value a hexcrawl structure is actually capable of providing.

At a basic level, I want to be able to pick up a hexmap and its key and have a fundamentally playable experience.

At a more advanced level, once you have a fully functional hexcrawl, there’s all kinds of cool utility that you can leverage out of that hexcrawl. For example, in Thinking About Wilderness Travel I looked at how the basic scaffolding for rich route-based travel basically just falls out of a properly designed hexcrawl key. Hexcrawls can also provide the context and tools for rapidly restocking empty dungeon complexes, as described in (Re-)Running the Megadunegon.

You can see the sample hex key I included as part of my longer series on hexcrawls.

If you’re looking for something like this on the market right now, check out The Dark of Hot Springs Island by Jacob Hurst, Gabriel Hernandez, Even Peterson, and Donnie Garcia. Every hex is keyed with content. Every lair and dungeon is mapped. And it’s paired to the incredible Field Guide to Hot Springs Island, an incredibly rich handout that’s designed to be given to your players as a kind of rumor table on steroids. It’s not just everything I want in a hexcrawl product; it’s more than that. And it’s the absolute gold standard to which any hexcrawl supplement should aspire.

Back to Hexcrawls

Go to Part 1

“If once we shake off pursuit, I shall make for Weathertop. It is a hill, just to the north of the Road, about half way from here to Rivendell. Gandalf will make for that point, if he follows us. After Weathertop our journey will become more difficult, and we shall have to choose between various dangers.” – Aragorn, Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien)

UNPATHED ROUTES: The basic route system described above assumes that the route follows a clear and unmistakable path — a road or river, for example. Some routes don’t follow paths, however. These generally take the form of a landmark chain: Head north to Archet, then turn east to Weathertop. Turn south from Weathertop, cross the road, and then head west until you hit the road again.

To handle unpathed routes, you’ll need to add mechanics for both (a) getting lost and (b) getting back on track after you’ve become lost. (This may also include a mechanic to determine whether or not you realize that you’re lost.)

A single route can also include both pathed and unpathed sections.

HIDDEN ROUTE FEATURES: The gansōm bridge was washed out by the spring floods, releasing howling water spirits into the Nazharrow River. Before arriving in the Bloodfens, the PCs were unaware of the presence of goblin rovers. They’re pleasantly surprised to discover that the Imperial checkpoint at the Karnic crossroads has been abandoned, its regiment summoned north to deal with peasant rebellions.

Although I mentioned before that PCs need to be aware of distinctions between the available routes in order to make a meaningful choice between them, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they need to know everything. Some aspects of a route’s speed, difficulty, stealth, expense, landmarks, or hazards can be initially hidden from the PCs and only discovered later.

In some cases, hidden route features can be uncovered before the journey begins if the PCs research the route or can get their hands on better maps.

FORKED ROUTES: Sometimes the choice of route (or additional choices of route) can appear after the journey has begun. These can include detours, in which the fork in the route eventually collapses back into the original route.

Detours are often made in response to hidden route features discovered along the way (the gansōm bridge has been washed out, so you need to figure out a different way across the river). PCs can be both pushed and pulled by detours, however: In addition to trying to avoid bad things on the original route, they might also choose to turn aside to gain some benefit (from an advantageous landmark, for example), usually at the cost of time.

PROCEDURAL CONTENT GENERATORS: Procedural content generators are generally nonessential to a scenario structure, but properly designed they can be large boons in content creation and can even unlock unique gameplay. Other than a random encounter table, what other content generators could we potentially develop?

I think one thing we can immediately rule out is trying to develop a map generator. Nothing wrong with a good random map generator, but it doesn’t feel like it’s directly connected to route travel. The assumption of the route system is that you know where Point A is, where Point B is, and what the general routes between them are going to be.

However, you might occasionally faced with a map like this one:

And need to ask yourself, “How can you get from Secomber to Dragonspear Castle?” There’s one obvious route that goes down the Delimbyr River to Daggerford and then along the Trade Way, but is that the only route?

So our first procedural content generator might randomly determine a type of route:

• Road
• River
• Landmark Chain
• Magical

You could bias that so that 1-5 is Road, 6-7 is River, 8-9 is Landmark Chain, and 10 is Magical on a d10 roll. If I literally roll a d10 while sitting at my desk here, I get a 1 and discover that there must be an old, disused road that crosses the High Moor. (It might be a remnant of the Netherese Empire.)

Let’s go back to the Secomber-Daggerford-Dragonspear Castle route on the map above. Remembering that a route is largely defined by the sequence of landmarks spaced along its length, we can see at the moment that the only landmark we know about is the city-state of Daggerford. So perhaps we develop a landmark generator. You could randomly determine a number of landmarks (perhaps 1d6+1) for a given route, and then generate specific landmarks in various categories:

• Settlement (town, village, fortress, shrine, inn)
• Ruin
• Lair
• Route Feature (bridge, wall, tunnel, toll, fork in the path)
• Natural Landmark

There’s likely other categories to be explored, and you can also easily dive down into any number of detailed sub-tables for each of these categories.

Now that you have a list of landmarks for the route, you might want to think about how those landmarks relate to the route itself. A landmark doesn’t necessarily need to be directly on the road, for example, so we could randomly determine the landmark connection:

• On Route
• Detectable From Route (sight, smell, sound)
• Detour (you have to leave the route in order to visit/see the landmark)

As you’re generating landmarks, you may want to get a better sense of how they connect to the wider world. So you might use a path generator to determine if the landmark is functionally a crossroads for many different routes or if it can only be reached along the road, river, or other route that the PCs are currently following.

You can use any number of methods to determine the presence/number of routes connected to the landmark, then randomly determine the type of route (see above), and then use a d8 for compass direction or d6 for hex direction to randomly determine the rough direction of the route.

Where do these other routes go? Unless the PCs express interest, you don’t necessarily need to explore that, although it can often provide good local color. (“About midday you come to the Inn of the Prancing Fairy. It lies at a crossroads with the road leading to Elegor in the north.”) Often you can just look at your map and get a pretty good idea of where they might go.

For example, if the PCs are travelling down the Delimbyr from Secomber to Daggerford and they come to a ruined tower that you determine is a crossroads with a route heading to the southeast, you could pretty easily conclude that there must be a small tributary river flowing out of the Misty Forest that joins the Delimbyr here.

As you’re describing the PCs’ journey, it may also be useful to describe the changing terrain they’re passing through. A terrain feature generator could use a simple mechanic like having a 1 in 6 chance each day of the terrain changing, and then tables to determine the new terrain features that they encounter (likely based on the base terrain type they’re traveling through). Terrain features could include vegetation, debris, obstacles, things seen on the horizon, etc.

RUNNING WITH ROUTES

As you begin running games with the route system, here are a few things to keep in mind.

First, the structure does not inherently make travel interesting. If you think of the structure as a way by which specific scenes (the landmarks and random encounters) can be easily framed, then it follows that you still need to make those scenes meaningful.

By default, the route system will lead you towards a generic travelogue (“…and then we went to X and then we went to Y and then we went to…”). But the best travelogues find ways to elevate the sequence of events. You want your game to resonate with the powerful journeys of The Lord of the Rings, rather than plodding along in the dull procedural of something like The Ringworld Engineers.

If you’re of a dramatist bent, think of what kind of story you want to be telling with this journey: Exploration, a race, escape, survival, self-discovery, edification. Or is the journey simply a convenient framing device for a number of individually interesting and complete short stories? Journeys can set mood (think of the emotional toll of Frodo and Sam’s long trek across Mordor), emphasize a theme (sure are a lot of goblins in these fens), establish current events (passing caravans of refugees from the war), or provide hooks to side quests.

Regardless, think about the agenda of the scenes you’re framing to. Why are you framing to these moments? What’s the bang that forces the PCs to make one or more meaningful choices in that scene? (These topics are discussed at more length in The Art of Pacing.)

If you can’t think of any agenda or bang for a particular landmark, then consider demoting that landmark to a part of the abstract description of the journey or even drop it entirely. (The truth is that the PCs will see a lot of stuff on the road. You’re going to skip over most of it. The important thing is to figure out what stuff you need to focus on in order for the journey to be meaningful.)

THE PROBLEM WITH MULTIPLE ROUTES: A fundamental problem with the route system is the choice between routes. This inherently creates a choose-your-own-adventure structure in which you’re prepping a lot of material for two different routes and then immediately throwing out at least half of that prep as soon as the PCs choose one route over another.

There are, however, a few ways that you can mitigate this problem.

First, you can often minimize wasted prep by having the players choose their route at the end of a session. You still need to broadly prep each route so that a meaningful choice can be made between routes, but this is fairly minimal and you only need to prep the chosen route in fully playable detail.

Second, in many cases there may not actually be a choice between multiple routes. We talked about this briefly before, but if the decision of route boils down to a calculation rather than true choice, then you only need to prep the route that’s calculated to be best.

Third, you can focus your prep on proactive elements that are relevant regardless of which route is chosen.

Being chased by the bad guys is an easy example of this: With the Ringwraiths chasing them from the Shire to Rivendell, the hobbits — and, later, Strider — make a number of route choices balancing speed, safety, and stealth. The threat of the Ringwraiths (and their other agents) make these choices interesting, but you only need to prep the Ringwraiths once.

You can also feature content that the PCs carry along the road with them. For example, you might prep a murder mystery and/or romantic drama that features the team of hirelings the PCs have brought along on the journey. For the “Battle of the Bands” scenario in the Welcome to the Island anthology for Over the Edge, Jeremy Tuohy and I developed an interlinked system of road talk and encounters on the road that create an evolving drama with the NPCs the characters collect along the way.

Fourth, you can find ways to reuse, reincorporate, and recycle material so that even if the PCs don’t see the stuff on Route B on this particular journey, you’ll still end up using it at some point in the future.

BACK TO HEXCRAWLS

Which actually brings us all the way back to hexcrawls.

Because it turns out that a lot of the stuff we’ve built into our route system — landmarks, navigation DCs, terrain, travel times, etc. — actually just fall out of a fully stocked hexcrawl with no additional prep whatsoever.

This is one of the many reasons that a truly ready-to-play hexcrawl would actually be one of the highest value supplements a game company could publish. The utility of the hexcrawl is incredibly high to any individual GM, particularly if you can eliminate the inefficient nature of most hexcrawl prep by spreading that value across an audience of hundreds or thousands.

(Unfortunately, most hexcrawl products aren’t fully stocked and ready-to-play. They just provide a very high level overview of the would-be content of the hexcrawl, leaving a lot of the actual work in the GM’s lap.)

To be clear here, I’m not saying that we should abandon the route system and go back to hexcrawling. The hexcrawl system is still optimized for exploration, not travel. What I’m saying is that if you map a route across a fully stocked hexcrawl, then 99% of the work in defining that route for us in the route system can just be directly yanked out of the hexcrawl content.

If you’re working from a hexcrawl, you can also begin experimenting with trailblazing structures in which the PCs create their own routes through the wilderness. In fact, whether you have a system for trailblazing or not in a hexcrawl campaign, you’ll probably find that the PCs just naturally create routes for themselves: They want to get back to the Citadel of Lost Wonders so that they can continue looting it, and they will figure out how to make that happen. These routes almost always take the form of landmark trails, and will often feature the PCs making their own navigational landmarks to fill in the gaps.

THE ROUTE MAP

Whether you’re working from a hexcrawl or not, if your campaign regularly features travel then you will, over time, begin to accumulate a collection of planned routes that crisscross the local region. Over time, it is likely that this route map will evolve into a pointcrawl: As the routes intersect and overlap with each other, the map will develop enough depth that the players can make complex navigational decisions and begin charting out their own routes in detail.

If this is a style of play that appeals to you, it may be tempting to imagine sitting down and planning this elaborate route map ahead of time as part of your campaign prep. There may be a few major, obvious routes where this makes sense, but for the most part I recommend resisting the temptation. Partly because the thought of all that wasted prep makes the little winged GM on my shoulder wince, but mostly because it’s intrinsically more effective to let the players (by way of their PCs) tell you where they want to go and what the important routes are.

In transportation planning there’s a concept called the desire path: These are the paths created by the erosion of human travel across grass or other ground covering. It’s the way that people want to travel, even if the planned or intended paths are telling them to take a different route.

It has become quite common for urban planners to open parks, college campuses, and similar spaces without sidewalks, wait to see where the desire paths naturally form, and only then install the pavement.

You’re doing the same thing here: Following the players’ paths of desire and developing the campaign along the lines that they have chosen.

FURTHER READING

If you’re interested in delving deeper into this sort of thing, I recommend checking out:

• Pathcrawls from Detect Magic
• Pointcrawls from Chris Kutalik
• Subhex Wilderness Generation from 9 and 30 Kingdoms

Let’s imagine that your players are in the city of Dweredell and they need to go to the village of Maernath to study the ancient crypt of the founder of the Verdigris Order.

How does that trip play out at the table?

The first option is the easiest: Skip it. Look at your map to figure out the distance between Dweredell and Maernath, consult a table of wilderness travel speeds to calculate how long the trip will take, and then say, “Okay, having journeyed northeast across the Viridwold, a week later you arrive in Maernath.”

There’s nothing wrong with this approach. In many cases, it will be exactly the right way to handle travel. Following the precepts of The Art of Pacing, you’ve determined that there are no interesting choices to be made during the journey and so you’re framing past that empty time to the next set of interesting choices.

But often you’ll reflect on this and feel vaguely unsatisfied. Perhaps you’ll think of any number of fantasy stories you’ve read in which the act of journeying from one location to another is a significant feature of the narrative and feel like you’re missing out on an opportunity. (These stories aren’t limited to fiction, either. Xenophon’s March of the 10,000 would be really boring if the Anabasis was just, “We left Cunaxa and, long story short, we were back in Greece two years later.”)

This line of thought — “Something should happen on the road to Maernath…” — often leads to some variation of Vaarsuvius’ Law of Random Road Encounters:

Of course, this still feels a trifle unsatisfying. You can see this in the expression of the “law” itself: Rather than being an awesome part of your game, the random road encounter feels like some sort of obligation.

(I will also briefly channel my grumpy grognard long enough to point out that if you’re handling random encounters properly they should be neither tedious nor a waste of time, but that’s a separate topic.)

Nevertheless, it feels like you could be doing more.

TRAVEL BY HEXCRAWL

At this point, with the rise of the Old School Renaissance, you may have heard about hexcrawling. That’s supposed to be a method for handling the wilderness in your campaign, right? So obviously the solution to your lackluster travel scenario is to build it as a hexcrawl.

I’ve written a whole series about how hexcrawls work, but the basic version is that you draw the wilderness as a hexmap, key each hex on the map with interesting content, and then trigger the content when the PCs enter the hex. The hexcrawl structure is primarily designed to support exploration, and if you’re prepping a single journey from Point A to Point B it is not the structure you want to use.

To demonstrate why, consider this hexmap from the Wilderlands of High Fantasy and imagine that your PCs want to take a trip from Warwik to Forcastle:

In order to prep that chunk of map as a proper hexcrawl, you would need to key every hex on the map. If you limited yourself to just the main peninsula of land shown here, that would mean prepping more than forty hexes of content. As the PCs journey from Warik to Forcastle, however, they would only visit a fraction of these hexes. In other words, you’ll end up prepping a lot of content that will never be used.

It’s clear that this is not an efficient way of prepping a specific journey through the wilderness, and it touches on a more fundamental truth, which is that the prep load for a hexcrawl really only makes sense if you’re going to be re-engaging with the same patch of wilderness dozens of times.

(This is trivial to achieve with an open table, where you can have dozens of players and characters traipsing across the same chunk of the world, but can be more difficult in a dedicated campaign with a single group of characters.)

The obvious rejoinder here is that you could theoretically prep this hexcrawl without prepping content for all these hexes. You could instead focus only on the hexes the PCs are likely to pass through. For example, in a journey from Warwik to Forcastle it’s relatively unlikely that they’ll end up at Wormshead Point.

BASIC TRAVEL ROUTES

As you begin zooming in on the most likely paths that the PCs could take from Point A to Point B, however, you’ll quickly discover that the hexcrawl structure itself is filled with procedures that become irrelevant if the PCs are following a predetermined route. What we really want is a structure dedicated to route-based travel that can focus our prep and be run efficiently at the table.

CHOOSE YOUR ROUTE: When beginning a new journey, the first thing the PCs must do is choose which route they’re going to use. This choice is only possible, of course, if the PCs are aware of what routes they can use to get where they’re going. They might gain that information from things like:

• Maps
• Local guides
• Mystical assistance
• Personal experience

If the PCs don’t know of any routes from where they are to where they want to go (and can’t find one before departing), then what they’re actually doing is exploring and you can default back to hexcrawling or a similar structure.

In order for the choice of routes to be interesting, there must be some meaningful distinction between the routes. “Meaningful” in this case means that it’s something the PCs care about. Common distinctions include:

• Speed. One route is faster than the other. (You will always need to calculate how long each route will take.)
• Difficulty. One route is more difficult to navigate. It might require special knowledge, special tools, or special skills to successfully traverse. (Climbing through the mountains or being able to answer the riddle of the gate-sphinx.)
• Stealth. One route will make it easier for the PCs to avoid detection. This can either be in general or a particular route might make it more difficult for one specific NPC or faction to detect them. (You can also conceptually invert this and instead think of it as a route making you vulnerable to detection from a particular faction: If you take the High Road you might be pressganged by the king’s army. The army’s recruiters don’t go into the Bloodfens, but if you go that way you’ll be at risk from the goblin rovers.)
• Expense. The cost of traveling the route. (This can be as simple as the price of a ticket.)
• Advantageous Landmarks. A route can have beneficial pitstops long the way, making it potentially more appealing than other options. (Visiting the Oracle of Delphi or seeing an old friend.)
• Hazards. Conversely, there might be a significant hazard along one of the routes. (You can enter Mordor this way, but you’ll have to figure out some way past Minas Morgul.)

In order for this to be a choice rather than a calculation, you’ll want to have the routes distinguished by at least two incomparable characteristics.

For example, consider a journey from Waterdeep to Neverwinter.

You look at the map and say, “You can take the High Road or you can travel by sea.”

“What’s the difference?” they ask.

“Well,” you say, “You’ll get there faster by sea.”

This is not a choice. It’s a simple calculation: The routes are identical except for the speed with which they’ll get you to Neverwinter, and so you take the route which is faster.

But if you instead say, “Well, it’s faster to sail, but there are reports of Moonshae pirates hitting ships along the coast,” this is no longer a simple calculation. The PCs have to choose whether speed or safety is more important to them.

One solid set of incomparable distinctions is all you need for this to work, but you can always add more (and you will generally find them arising naturalistically out of the given circumstances of the game world). Watch out, though, for inadvertently turning the choice back into a calculation as you add complexity. For example, you might say:

• The sea route is faster and is dangerous due to pirates.
• The road is dangerous due to the hazards of the Mere of Dead Men.

If the pirates and the restless undead of the mere are known to be equally hazardous, then you’re back to a straight-up calculation: There’s equal danger on both routes and one route is faster.

(This doesn’t happen if the PCs can’t be sure of the relative hazard posed by the pirates and undead. In that scenario it becomes an incomplete information problem. This is one of the subtle ways in which My Precious Encounter™ and similar design methodologies that always adjust the difficulty of the game world to the level of the PCs so that all challenges are identical degrade the depth of play. It creates a meta which eliminates incomplete information problems. But I digress.)

This is also why the PCs have to care about the distinction between routes. If speed isn’t actually important to them (they need to be there before June and either route will get them there by April), then Faster + Hazardous vs. Slower + Safer is still just a calculation, this time of which route is safer.

Don’t feel like you need to create stuff to make a particular route a viable choice, though. Just recognize that it’s not a choice and don’t present it as such (or explain why it isn’t if that’s relevant). For example, if you’re trying to get from Chicago to Indianapolis, you wouldn’t consider “first drive to St. Louis, then turn around and drive back to Indianapolis” as an option. (Because why would you?)

TRAVELING THE ROUTE: You’ll want to break the journey into a number of turns. I recommend multiple turns per day (so that it’s possible to have more than one encounter per day), and if you’re also doing hexcrawling in the campaign I recommend using the same timekeeping. (This consistency will make it easy to swap back and forth between the two travel structures. More on that later.) If we were using my structure for hexcrawls, this would mean six watches per day (two of which would generally be spent travelling and four resting).

There are three things you’re tracking as part of your procedure:

• Landmarks. A route is fundamentally defined by the sequence of landmarks that are spaced along its length. This might be permanent structures (cities, statues, etc.) or they might be programmed encounters that only apply to this specific journey (a broken down wagon, an ambush by goblin rovers, etc.), but either way they’ll be encountered at specific points along the route.
• Random Encounters. If you’re designing an encounter table specifically for the journey, I recommend keeping it pretty simple unless you’re planning to use this route repeatedly.
• Resources Used. Food, water, etc. This is optional, and there are many types of trips in which it won’t be relevant. (For example, if food and board are included in the price of your ticket.)

What about distance traveled? If you’re familiar with my hexcrawl structure (and many others), you’ll know that a key part of the procedure is determining exactly how far people have traveled each day. When traveling by routes, though, this is unnecessary because this is built into the design of the route: You know the total time it will take to traverse the route, you know at which times along the route you’ll encounter landmarks, and travel along most types of routes will generally be far more predictable and consistent than traipsing through the wilderness. (At a meta-level, variable travel distance creates an additional variable that complicates mapping and navigation in wilderness exploration. This is largely irrelevant if you’re traveling along a known route, which is another reason to ignore it.)

If the PCs take actions which vary the speed of their travel, you can apply those modifiers directly to the route timetable. If you really want to do the simulation of variable distance traveled per day (and there are scenarios in which this could easily be relevant), then it’s fairly easy to add this into your procedures.

On that note, let’s talk about additional features and levels of complexity that you can add to this basic, streamlined structure.

Go to Part 2

If there’s one fundamental lesson I think you should take away from Don’t Prep Plots or Smart Prep, it’s to think of your prep as a collection of tools that you can use during the game rather than a story you’ve written. Or as a box full of toys that you can play with at the table (the same way the players are playing their characters) rather than a script to be read from. Or whatever other metaphor works for you.

Those previous articles already discuss this principle in both general and specific terms, so I’m not going to spend a lot of time today retreading that ground. I’m going to assume that you’ve already discovered the joy of actively playing scenarios, and what I want to talk about today are the toys you could be playing with, but may not realize that you already have in your toybox.

Perhaps the best way to explain what I’m talking about is by way of example.

NEWSSHEETS

For my Ptolus campaign, part of my campaign status document is a list of upcoming headlines/articles in the local newssheets. For example:

• Another high-profile robbery in the Nobles’ District. Attributed to Shilukar. Said to have broken into Dallaster Manor and assaulted the Dallaster’s daughter and heiress, Tillian.
• Ratmen openly prowling streets of the Warrens after dark. City Watch refuses to patrol the area, although they’ve increased patrols along Old Sea Road to keep the problem contained to the Warrens.

And so forth. The current version of the sheet has the next fifteen or so days of newssheets mapped out and I do the same thing in my Dragon Heist campaign for broadsheets in Waterdeep. Some of the news items tie into future scenarios, others reflect the ongoing activities of the PCs, and some are just random events unrelated to the PCs.

The primary reason I started prepping these is the obvious one: My players were routinely checking the local newssheets to see what was going on in the city and it was useful to give some thought to what they’d find when they did.

Although designed as a single-use tool (PC wants to look at headlines → give them the current headlines), once I had the tool in my campaign status document I began discovering that there were actually lots of different ways that I could use it. For example:

• When canvassing local taverns for gossip.
• Conversational topics for NPCs, both generally and when using the party planning game structure. (Particularly true when improvising a party in the middle of a game session, like the one described here.)
• Feeding content into conversations they’re eavesdropping on.
• Local color. (A scrap of newspaper blowing down the deserted street; a news boy shouting headlines on the corner. Graffiti about the current scandal sprayed on a wall.)

To find these hidden tools, I just had to stop thinking of the list as being specifically “this is what appears in the newssheet” and started thinking of it in the more general sense of “this is what’s going on in the city / what people are talking about / what’s in the public consciousness.” What looked as if it was very specific content actually had a much broader general utility.

One of the interesting consequences of identifying and using these “hidden” tools is that it will often highlight places where, as described in Smart Prep, you can completely eliminate unnecessary prep. For example, when I first started prepping news stories for a campaign I would often get very specific: What newspaper were they published in? What was the headline? Et cetera. When I started using these tools in different ways, I realized that these details were often superfluous waste. The thing that was actually useful was the core piece of information. Everything else could be improvised during actual play depending on how the information intersected with the PCs.

This is not to say that the contextualization isn’t important. (Exactly the opposite!) It’s not even to say that this sort of contextualization shouldn’t be prepped. For example, you can see here how I researched specific newspapers from the 1930s for my Eternal Lies campaign. Note how easily you can grab one of these newspapers and combine them with a news item like the examples above and instantly contextualize the information: You don’t need to prep a specific newspaper for every single article in order to get the same effect in actual play. Similarly, it’s quite probable that if the PCs are getting this information from a PC or a tavern, then it’s also something you’ve prepped.

You can also think of this as prepping a collection of more generic tools that can be combined together in order to flexibly respond to any number of possibilities, rather than prepping hyper-specialized tools that can only be used in one specific way. Looking for your “hidden tools” is one way of taking a specialized tool and making it more widely useful. (Note, though, how this greater utility often takes the form of less prep, not more!)

But it’s important not to mistake this for a reductio ad absurdum where the goal is to eliminate all specificity. If you look at that same Eternal Lies campaign, for example, you’ll find any number of instances where I prepped very specific newspaper articles, books, or the like.

PERMISSIVE CLUE-FINDING

The principle of permissive clue-finding, described as a corollary to the Three Clue Rule, is actually another example of using hidden tools.

Basically, when you design a mystery scenario, you prep a specific list of revelations that are necessary to solve the mystery and then you prep specific clues that point to each revelation so that the players/PCs can figure it out. The principle of permissive clue-finding is simply to provide meaningful clues in response to PC-initiated investigations even if they are not the clues that you prepped ahead of time.

The revelations on your revelation list are, effectively, your hidden tools: You know that solving the mystery lies in grokking those revelations, so when the PCs start pursuing an investigatory path you hadn’t anticipated, all you need to do is figure out how (or if) it can be related back to one of those revelations.

HEXES & RUMORS

Here’s a technique I used when running my OD&D hexcrawl.

I wanted to seed the campaign with rumors, so I decided that new characters would begin play with 1d4 rumors and existing characters could make a Charisma check in the downtime between sessions to pick up a rumor. I experimented with a traditional 1d20 and, later, a 1d30 rumor table, but because it was an open table with several dozen players and even more characters the rumor table would basically get burned up as soon as I stocked it. I didn’t want to spend a lot of time restocking the rumor table (particularly because many rumors were never pursued, which felt like semi-wasted prep), so rather than rolling on a rumor table I started just randomly selecting one of the hexes on my map, looking at what the hex contained, and then just improvising an appropriate rumor.

So, for example, I might randomly select Hex C2 and read:

C1 – WHITE DRAGON LAIR

Queen of the Claw – Elder White Dragon (AC 2, 12 HD)

• Suspicious of Dyre (hex A1)
• Daughter (Paicyro) ran away and knows a secret entrance (hex C8)
• Remembers a time of Ashardalon and opposed him when she was a wyrmling

Sired a pack of half-dragon dire wolves (AC 2, 4+2 HD).

Served by the Twelve White Claws, elite anubian warriors chosen for the honor in a gladiatorial combat once every 10 years.

TREASURE: 8000 silver, 30,000 gold, 98 gems, 10 jewelry

And come up with any number of rumors like:

• Traders coming through the Gap have seen a White Dragon circling a mountain peak northwest of the Cloud Spiral.
• In an ancient Thracian text kept by the Temple of Minerva, you discover references to a “Queen of the Claw” who opposed the dragon god Ashardalon. She is said to have been entombed with untold wealth in a crypt “in the peaks directly north of the Tower of Wind”.
• A caravan passing through the Gap was found slaughtered. Those who found their ruined bodies heard a reptilian howling in the hills to the north. They quickly buried the bodies and fled.

You can probably come up with another half dozen such rumors yourself, even without knowing the wider context and lore of this particular campaign world.

Note that the hexes are still fulfilling the primary function I had designed them for (being discovered during a hexcrawl). It’s just that they were now also being leveraged and put to new use. (With, you’ll note, no additional prep on my part whatsoever.)

CONCLUSION

The point here is to reprogram your brain so that when you prep X in order to do Y you don’t lock down on the idea that Y is the only thing you can do with X.

Along the way you may discover that, instead of trying to prep something in order to do Y, it makes more sense to cut out the middleman and go straight to prepping something that’s directly designed to be flexibly used in multiple ways. That’s great! Y will still be taken care of, but now you can also take care of a bunch of other stuff.

At a macro-level I say don’t prep plots, prep situations. At the micro-level, we might describe this as prepping content instead of writing outcomes.

From one point of view, the playing of a roleplaying game can be described as the organized exchange of information between players. Particularly numerical information.

GM: Give me an attack roll.
Player: 17.
GM: You hit.
Player: I do 18 points of damage.
GM: The orc falls dead at your feet!

The player generates a number (rolling their attack skill plus a d20 roll) and gives it to the GM. The GM performs a mathematical operation on that number (comparing it to the orc’s armor class) and the result of that operation causes him to request an additional number from the player. The player generates that number (by rolling the damage for their weapon) and reports it to the GM, who once again does an operation on that number (comparing it to the orc’s remaining hit points) and determines an outcome (the orc dies).

This seems simple and intuitive. And, in this case, it largely is.

But it turns out that how we process and pass numerical information around the table can have a big impact on play. For example:

GM: The orc’s AC is 17. Give me an attack roll.
Player: I hit. 18 points of damage.
GM: The orc falls dead at your feet!

By passing a piece of information (and the associated mathematical operation) over to the player, this GM has significantly improved the efficiency of their communication. If the orc hadn’t died (or if there are other identical orcs), this efficiency compounds over time because the GM doesn’t have to keep passing that piece of information to the player.

Of course, efficiency is not the be-all and end-all of a roleplaying game. There are any number of reasons why a GM might want to keep the orc’s armor class secret from the players (either as a general principle or due to specific circumstances). My point is not that these other considerations are somehow “wrong,” but rather simply that in choosing those other things the GM is sacrificing efficiency.

In many cases, however, the GM isn’t aware that this is a choice that they’re making. And often there are no reasons that might justify the inefficiency; the flow of information (and the impact it’s having on play) just isn’t something the GM is thinking about.

For a long time, this wasn’t something that I understood, either. I’d have discussions with people complaining that such-and-such a system was super complicated and a huge headache to play, and I would be confused because that didn’t match my experience with the game. It would have been easy to pat myself on the back and think, “Well, I guess I’m just smarter than they are,” but I would also have players say to me, “I’d played such-and-such a system before and I hated it, but you really made everything make sense. Can’t wait to play again.” And I’d scratch my head, because I really hadn’t done anything special in terms of teaching how the game worked.

The difference was in the flow of information. Not only can the flow of information around the gaming table be inefficient, it can also be confusing and burdensome.

ECLIPSE PHASE

We think of game mechanics primarily in terms of numerical values and how those values are created or manipulated. But in actual practice, many mechanical resolutions are performed by multiple people at the table. If you think of the resolution as a ball, it often has to be passed back and forth. Or you might think of it as a dance, and if we — as a table of players — don’t coordinate our actions in performing the resolution we’ll end up stepping on each other’s toes.

This efficient passing of information is an example of system mastery. Often, as a table gains experience with a particular RPG together, they’ll intuitively find the patterns of behavior that work. But this doesn’t always happen, and when it doesn’t we can benefit from consciously thinking about:

• What numbers we say
• Who is responsible for saying them
• How we say them

Let me give a simple example of this, using Eclipse Phase.

Eclipse Phase is a percentile system. You modify your skill rating by difficulty and then, if you roll under that number on percentile dice, you succeed. In addition, your margin of success is equal to the number you roll on the dice. If you roll 30+ (and succeed) you get an excellent success; if you roll 60+ you get an exceptional success.

Here’s how things often go when I’m introducing new players to Eclipse Phase (particularly those new to roll-under percentile systems entirely):

GM: Give me a Navigation check.
Player: I got a 47.
GM: What’s your skill?
Player: 50.
GM: Great. That’s a success. An excellent success, actually, because you rolled over 30. Here’s what happens…

The players don’t know what numbers to give me, and so I need to pull those numbers out of them in order to perform the necessary operation (determining if this is a success or failure and the degree of success.) As players start to master the system, this will morph into:

GM: Give me a Navigation check.
Player: I got an excellent success.
GM: Great. Here’s what happens…

They can do this because they’ve learned the mechanics and now know that their roll of 47 when they have a skill of 50 is an excellent success. (In this, the exchange mirrors that of a player attacking an orc in D&D when they know it has AC 17, right? They don’t need to pass me the information to perform the mechanical operation because they can do the operation themselves. In fact, many people like roll-under percentile systems like this specifically because they make this kind of efficiency intuitive and almost automatic.)

But there’s actually a problem with this because, if you recall, Eclipse Phase also features difficulties which modify the target number. This disrupts the simple efficiency and we would often end up with discussions like this:

GM: Give me a Navigation check.
Player: I got an excellent success.
GM: There’s actually a difficulty here. What did you roll?
Player: 47.
GM: And what’s your skill?
Player: 50.
GM: Okay, so you actually failed. Here’s what happens…

This creates all kinds of friction at the table: It’s inefficient. It’s frequently confusing. And either the outcome doesn’t change at all (in which case we’ve deflated the drama of the resolution for no reason) or the player is frustrated that an outcome they thought was going one way is actually going the other.

The reason this is happening is because there is an operation that I, as the GM, need to perform (applying a hidden difficulty) but I’m not being given the number I need to perform that operation. The player has learned to throw the ball to a certain spot (“I got an excellent success”), but I’m frequently not standing at that spot and the ball painfully drops to the ground.

What I eventually figured out is that the information I need from the player is actually “XX out of YY” — where XX is the die roll and YY is their skill rating. I could catch that ball and easily carry it wherever it needed to go.

GM: Give me a Navigation check.
Player: I got 47 out of 55.
GM: An excellent success! Here’s what happens…

And I realized that I could literally just tell players that this is what they needed to say to me. I didn’t need to wait for them to figure it out. Even brand new players could almost instantly groove into the system.

ADVANCED D&D

As you spend more time with a system, you’ll frequently find odd corners which require a different flow of information. In some cases you may be able to tweak your table norms to account for the special cases, but usually it’ll be more about learning when and how to cue your players that you all need to handle this information differently (and the players gaining the mastery to be able to quickly grok the new, sometimes overlapping, circumstances).

Let’s go back to D&D, for example.

When I’m a DM and I’ve got a horde of orcs attacking a single PC, it’s not unusual for me to roll all of their attacks at once, roll all of the damage from the successful attacks, add all that damage up, and then report it as a single total to the player. It just makes sense to do a running total of the numbers in front of me as I generate them rather than saying a string of numbers to a player and asking them to process the verbal information while doing the running total themselves.

And, of course, it works just fine… right up until a PC gets damage reduction. Now it’s the player who needs to perform a mechanical operation (subtracting their damage reduction from each hit) and doesn’t have the information they need to do that.

Even PCs with multiple attacks usually resolve them one by one for various reasons, so the reverse (players lumping damage together when the GM needs to apply damage reduction) rarely happens. But two of the PCs in my 3^rd Edition campaign have weapons that deal bonus elemental damage, and they’ve learned that sometimes I need that damage specifically broken out because creatures are frequently resistant against or immune to fire or electricity damage.

When we first started running into this difficulty, the players defaulted to always giving me the elemental damage separately. But this was an unneeded inefficiency, and we quickly figured out that it was easier for me to simply tell them when they needed to give me the elemental damage separately.

These are simple examples, but they hopefully demonstrate that this sort of mastery is not an all-or-nothing affair. There’s almost always room to learn new tricks.

FENG SHUI

Let’s also take a look at one of these systems that’s fairly straightforward in its mechanical operations, but which can become devilishly difficult if you don’t pass information back and forth cleanly.

In Feng Shui 2, the dice mechanic produces a “swerve”: You subtract a negative d6 from a positive d6 in order to generate a bell curve result from -5 to +5. (Sixes actually explode and are rolled again, so the curve is smeared out at the ends, but that’s basically how it works.)

When you want to make an attack, you do two things. First, you check to see if you hit:

Roll Swerve + Attack Skill – Target’s Defense

If you hit, you then calculate damage:

Margin of Success + Weapon Damage – Target’s Toughness

Looking at those two equations on the page, there doesn’t seem to be anything particularly exotic about them. In practice, though, I’ve seen players and entire groups get completely tangled up in them. There tend to be two major problems:

1. The attacker feels as if they should be able to complete one full step of this process and then report the result… except they can’t, because neither step can actually be completed without information that the defender posseses.
2. Upon completing the first step, players want to report a flat success/failure outcome (“I hit”), but if they don’t pass the margin of success to the damage equation they can’t actually calculate damage.

What frequently happens in the latter case is:

GM: The target’s Defense is 17.
Player: (does math) Okay, I hit!
GM: So your damage will be equal to the margin of success plus your weapon damage. What was your margin of success?
Player: Uh… crap. I forgot? Three? Maybe four? Hang on… (does the math again)

Another interesting thing that will happen in this kind of situation is that the players — who don’t like being confused or frustrated! — will try to find ad hoc ways of routing around the problem. In Feng Shui 2, for example, I’ll frequently see players basically say, “Well… I know what this guy’s Defense value is because I attacked him last round. So I’m just going to attack him again to keep it simple.”

The important thing to take away from this is that the players want to solve the problem just as much as you do. But often this kind of ad hoc pseudo-solution just shifts the frustration: They’ve figured out how to make the mechanical resolution flow more smoothly, but they feel trapped by the system into making choices that they don’t necessarily want to make. The insane, over-the-top Hong Kong action of Feng Shui 2, for example, has been compromised as they attack the same guy over and over again.

So let’s say that you find yourself in this situation. How can you fix it?

• Identify the sequence in which mechanical operations must be performed.
• Identify who has the necessary information for each operation.
• Figure out how to pass the information to the necessary person at each stage of the opration.

For example, in Feng Shui 2 who has each piece of information used when resolving an attack?

• Outcome of the swerve roll. (Attacker)
• Attack Skill (Attacker)
• Target’s Defense (Defender)
• Margin of Success (whoever calculated the outcome of the attack roll)
• Weapon Damage (Attacker)
• Target’s Toughness (Defender)
• Wound Points taken (Defender)

If you look back up at the mechanical equations, it should be fairly easy to identify the resolution sequence and the numbers that need to be said:

1. Attacker rolls swerve and adds their attack skill. (The game actually calls this the Action Result.) Attacker tells the Defender this number.
2. Defender subtracts their Defense from the Action Result. (This is the margin of success. The game calls this the Outcome.) Defender tells the Attacker the Outcome.
3. The Attacker adds the Outcome to the Weapon Damage. (The game calls this the Smackdown.) The Attacker tells the Defender the Smackdown.
4. The Defender subtracts their Toughness from the Smackdown. (This is the number of Wound Points they take.)

You can see that Robin D. Laws, being a clever chap, identified the significant chunks of information in the system and gave them specific labels (Action Result, Outcome, Smackdown). Other games won’t necessarily do that for you (and even the Feng Shui 2 rulebook, unfortunately, doesn’t specifically call out how the information should be passed back and forth), but you should be able to break down the mechanical processes in any system in a similar manner.

PIGGYBACKING IN GUMSHOE (AND BEYOND!)

Let me close by talking about a mechanical interaction that has multiple players participating simultaneously (which, of course, makes the “dance” of information more complicated to coordinate).

In the GUMSHOE System (used by games like Ashen Stars and Trail of Cthulhu), some group checks are resolved using a piggybacking mechanic:

• One character is designated the Lead.
• The difficulty of the test is equal to the base difficulty + 2 per additional character “piggybacking” on the Lead’s check.
• Those piggybacking can spend 1 skill point to negate the +2 difficulty they’re adding to the check.

The mechanic is very useful when, for example, you want Aragorn to lead the hobbits through the wilderness without being detected by Ringwraiths: The more unskilled hobbits there are, the more difficult it should be for Aragorn to do that, but you still want success to be governed by Aragorn’s skill at leading the group.

Many moons ago I adapted this piggybacking structure to D20 systems like this:

• One character takes the Lead.
• Other characters can “piggyback” on the Lead’s skill check by making their own skill check at a DC equal to half of the DC of the Lead’s check. (So if the Lead is making a DC 30 check, the piggybackers must make a DC 15 check.)
• The lead character can reduce the Piggyback DC by 1 for every -2 penalty they accept on their check.
• The decision to piggyback on the check must be made before the Lead’s check is made.

On paper, this system made sense. When I put it into practice at the table, however, it wasn’t working out. It seemed complicated, finicky, and the players weren’t enjoying using the mechanic.

I gave up on it for a couple of years, and then came back to it and realized that the problem was that I had been sequencing the mechanic incorrectly. One element of this was actually a slight error in mechanical design, but even this was ultimately about the resolution sequence.

The way the mechanic was being resolved originally was:

• The GM declares that, for example, a Stealth check needs to be made.
• The players decide whether they want to use the Piggyback mechanic for this.
• The GM approves it.
• The players choose a Lead.
• The other players decide whether they want to piggyback or not.
• The Lead chooses whether or not they want to lower the Piggybacking DC.
• The Lead would roll their check.
• If the Lead succeeded, the other players would roll their piggybacking checks. (The logic being that if the Lead failed, there was no need for the piggybacking checks. But, in practice, players would see the Lead’s result and then try to opt out of piggybacking if it was bad.)

Here’s what the actual resolution sequence needed to be:

• The GM declares that there is a piggyback check required.
• The players choose their Lead.
• The other players make their piggybacking checks. If any check fails, the largest margin of failure among all piggybacking characters increases the DC of the Lead’s check by +1 per two points of margin of failure.
• The Lead makes their check.

You can immediately see, just from the number of steps involved, how much more streamlined this resolution process is. The only actual mechanical adjustment, however, is to shift the adjustment of the piggybacking DC from a decision made before the piggybacking checks to an effect of those checks.

The take-away here is that while our passing of mechanical information at the table is often numerical, it can also include other elements (like who’s taking Lead in a piggybacking check) which can also be streamlined and formalized for efficiency.