Yora
2017-05-28, 07:19 AM
Something I've always wanted to do with my campaigns, but I don't think I've ever actually pulled off, was to make the setting feel like a vast wilderness world that is mostly unexplored and barely inhabited. I don't want it to be Cave Men World and still have good numbers of ruined castles, sorcerer lairs, and bandit strongholds, but I really want to do something very different from Ye Olde England or a Roman Empire. Basically a Points of Light type of thing.
Worldbuilding is certainly an element of it, but much of that would be mostly show, while what the players really need to feel it is going to be tell. I want to present adventures in a way that makes the players come to the conclusion themselves that they really are adventuring in a vast wilderness and not the woods outside of town. I got some ideas on which I'd appreciate some comments, and also would like to hear additional ideas for what can be done in that regard.
What I think is probably quite obvious is that the main sites where the big things happend and discoveries are made (the ruins and lairs) have to be reached by a wilderness journey from the next nearby stronghold of civilization and are not just a short walk away to be back by sunset.
But much less obvious is that it's probably also a good idea to not have the adventure start within said stronghold, but to begin with a journey to reach it in the first place. If you start in what is going to be the primary settlement where the party has its base camp, then I think it might feel somewhat like home, or that getting from one stronghold to another is easy because it's skimmed over between adventures. When the party travels from settlement A to settlement B, it's probably not worth playing out the entire yourney, especially when it's a trek of weeks to completely different parts of the world. So leaving a stronghold to transition the campaign to the next adventure in a different part of the world can probably be skipped (after the players gathered the supplies that they want to have at the start of the next adventure, except for food). However, the next adventure begins again in the wilderness with still some distance to travel until they reach the settlement where they want to set up camp for the nearby future. My first guess would be to start at a point with still three days of travel left before getting there.
Something else, which I've really come to appreciate, is to not give the players detailed maps. Every single detail that is on the map is something that somebody has already seen, written down, and made available information to anyone with access to that map. The more vague and sketchy the maps are that the players have acess to, the stronger the impression that the area is rarely traveled and information about it shared. A map like this one (http://nentirvale.wdfiles.com/local--files/setting/nentir_vale.png) creates the impression that the people living in the area have knowledge of it that is accurate enought to show the actual bends of the rivers, the contours of forests, the shapes of lakeshores and the sizes and locations of small islands. Some of the areas shown on the map may be uninhabited now, but you get the impression that in the past someone has been there for long enough to be able to draw all the major geographical features, even if a large number of specific ruins and caves are not drawn in yet. Whatever map you give the players will usually be assumed to be looking exactly like the map the characters have in their pockets. If the goal is to have the players reach their destination but feel like they are in mostly unknown terrritory, I find this style of map (http://img11.deviantart.net/44a9/i/2016/015/0/1/aarina_s_map_of_skyrrst_by_gobbokilla-d9o0067.png) to be much more effective. Players can't point with a stick on the map and say "we are here", but only circle with a finger over an area and say "we're somehwere about there".
Which is also why I think that players should never see a hex map of the setting and GMs don't need to have one, unless the campaign is specifically about the players making a cartographic survey of an area. (Which I believe is what many hexcrawling campaigns do.) The information that PCs generally have available on the ground is "the mountains are to the north and look to be about twice as far away as the sea that is to the south". They usually won't have the means to pinpoint their exact position within an accuracy of three miles, especially when they are in what is effectively unmapped territory. You keep going into a general direction until you either see your destination or find a river, coast, or mountain range that you can follow until you do.
Another thing that I always failed to do in all my years as a GM, but which I now feeel should really make an important difference, is tracking food supplies. Which just never seemed to matter because my dungeons were always just a two day's march from the next town where food could be stocked up indefinitly for negligible amounts of money. But if it takes a week to get to the dungeon, a week to get back, and the party won't be going througn the whole place in a single afternoon, then the amount of food they need to bring becomes really quite substential, especially if they have hirelings and pack animals with them. This forces players to keep an eye on how much food they have left until they need to buy or collect new supplies. Buying means going all the way back and dealing with all the dangers along the way, while collecting food takes time.
The rules for collecting food don't have to be complicated, but they shouldn't be trivial either. It doesn't need to have a real risk for starvation. Only a very real risk of slowing the journey down to a crawl if the environment is inhospitable and the party doesn't have specialist of the appropriate type with them (ranger, druid, hunter, scout, ...). I wouldn't spend any significant amount of play time on this myself, but I think it should make the players regularly consider how long their journeys are taking, how far it is to the next place where they can resupply, and how long they can afford to linger in the wilderness. This should help to make them actually feel that they are far from any inhabited place and make the discovery of hidden settlements much more significant.
Worldbuilding is certainly an element of it, but much of that would be mostly show, while what the players really need to feel it is going to be tell. I want to present adventures in a way that makes the players come to the conclusion themselves that they really are adventuring in a vast wilderness and not the woods outside of town. I got some ideas on which I'd appreciate some comments, and also would like to hear additional ideas for what can be done in that regard.
What I think is probably quite obvious is that the main sites where the big things happend and discoveries are made (the ruins and lairs) have to be reached by a wilderness journey from the next nearby stronghold of civilization and are not just a short walk away to be back by sunset.
But much less obvious is that it's probably also a good idea to not have the adventure start within said stronghold, but to begin with a journey to reach it in the first place. If you start in what is going to be the primary settlement where the party has its base camp, then I think it might feel somewhat like home, or that getting from one stronghold to another is easy because it's skimmed over between adventures. When the party travels from settlement A to settlement B, it's probably not worth playing out the entire yourney, especially when it's a trek of weeks to completely different parts of the world. So leaving a stronghold to transition the campaign to the next adventure in a different part of the world can probably be skipped (after the players gathered the supplies that they want to have at the start of the next adventure, except for food). However, the next adventure begins again in the wilderness with still some distance to travel until they reach the settlement where they want to set up camp for the nearby future. My first guess would be to start at a point with still three days of travel left before getting there.
Something else, which I've really come to appreciate, is to not give the players detailed maps. Every single detail that is on the map is something that somebody has already seen, written down, and made available information to anyone with access to that map. The more vague and sketchy the maps are that the players have acess to, the stronger the impression that the area is rarely traveled and information about it shared. A map like this one (http://nentirvale.wdfiles.com/local--files/setting/nentir_vale.png) creates the impression that the people living in the area have knowledge of it that is accurate enought to show the actual bends of the rivers, the contours of forests, the shapes of lakeshores and the sizes and locations of small islands. Some of the areas shown on the map may be uninhabited now, but you get the impression that in the past someone has been there for long enough to be able to draw all the major geographical features, even if a large number of specific ruins and caves are not drawn in yet. Whatever map you give the players will usually be assumed to be looking exactly like the map the characters have in their pockets. If the goal is to have the players reach their destination but feel like they are in mostly unknown terrritory, I find this style of map (http://img11.deviantart.net/44a9/i/2016/015/0/1/aarina_s_map_of_skyrrst_by_gobbokilla-d9o0067.png) to be much more effective. Players can't point with a stick on the map and say "we are here", but only circle with a finger over an area and say "we're somehwere about there".
Which is also why I think that players should never see a hex map of the setting and GMs don't need to have one, unless the campaign is specifically about the players making a cartographic survey of an area. (Which I believe is what many hexcrawling campaigns do.) The information that PCs generally have available on the ground is "the mountains are to the north and look to be about twice as far away as the sea that is to the south". They usually won't have the means to pinpoint their exact position within an accuracy of three miles, especially when they are in what is effectively unmapped territory. You keep going into a general direction until you either see your destination or find a river, coast, or mountain range that you can follow until you do.
Another thing that I always failed to do in all my years as a GM, but which I now feeel should really make an important difference, is tracking food supplies. Which just never seemed to matter because my dungeons were always just a two day's march from the next town where food could be stocked up indefinitly for negligible amounts of money. But if it takes a week to get to the dungeon, a week to get back, and the party won't be going througn the whole place in a single afternoon, then the amount of food they need to bring becomes really quite substential, especially if they have hirelings and pack animals with them. This forces players to keep an eye on how much food they have left until they need to buy or collect new supplies. Buying means going all the way back and dealing with all the dangers along the way, while collecting food takes time.
The rules for collecting food don't have to be complicated, but they shouldn't be trivial either. It doesn't need to have a real risk for starvation. Only a very real risk of slowing the journey down to a crawl if the environment is inhospitable and the party doesn't have specialist of the appropriate type with them (ranger, druid, hunter, scout, ...). I wouldn't spend any significant amount of play time on this myself, but I think it should make the players regularly consider how long their journeys are taking, how far it is to the next place where they can resupply, and how long they can afford to linger in the wilderness. This should help to make them actually feel that they are far from any inhabited place and make the discovery of hidden settlements much more significant.