This week in the lab, our crew of 1st and 2nd level freebooters will be plumbing the depths beneath the ruined city of Sjorrin Leid. At first I was planning to do try to generate it node-by-node on the fly, Meazar-style, but after a week’s delay I felt the need to flesh it out a bit. So I drew a nodal map to get a handle on my vague sense of how things fit together underground, generated a bunch of danger and discovery prompts using the PW tables, and wrote them up.
I’m curious about how dungeon crawling can work in the space between mapping every 10’x10′ square and the more cinematic Dungeon World approach. I’m also trying to structure play such that the Venture Forth move in FotF can be used to explore the underworld as easily as overland.
Will report back after we see how it goes!
I think something happens in a player’s mind when you say, “The empty corridor stretches ahead of you 40′ with a door on the left side in the center of the final 10′ square” as opposed to, _”The upper halls seem vacant: long corridors punctuated with wedged doors that take some time to force. After a few hours you find a way down.”
If I ever run a dungeon crawl again (not much demand right now) I would do it exactly this way.
Michael Prescott it’s basically scene framing, right?
In the former, the GM is framing a scene that’s zoomed in on the moment-to-moment actions. The players have a mind set of “every little thing I do matters.” (And this is often combined with things like “the tiles just before you reach the door are a pressure plate, and anyone who steps on it springs a trap.”)
In the latter, you’re framing the scene like a montage, zooming to the next part. They players will take the GMs word that the details of the upper levels weren’t worth worrying about, and focus on what’s in front of them. The players might be like “whoa whoa whoa, while we’re exploring the upper levels, I’m marking our path with chalk” or something like that, but they’ll mostly go along with it and be like, “Okay, cool, stairs down… what I see?”
Jeremy Strandberg I inadvertently made the wrong point. All I meant to be saying is that the GM’s language can communicate what they expect to be important to the players. There are ways of describing spaces using evocative language but which don’t refer to specifics of geometry.
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Michael Prescott Oh, sure. Agree completely! (Though I think that’s what scene framing does, too.)
Jason Lutes I’m sure you know about Point Crawling? http://hillcantons.blogspot.com/2012/01/crawling-without-hexes-pointcrawl.html
I’d figure it could work pretty similar underground.
There was also a good post some years ago about running FATE as a serious of connected locations rather than squares or hexes, but I don’t have a link anymore.
Looks fun!
Maybe something like my custom move would be useful? https://docs.google.com/document/d/1AqYdaENXwMs8NdFpGXxQXw9mI85CYJrGUfDOH_nTDIM/edit?usp=sharing
Tom Walker, I am curious but it looks like I need permission to see that?
Jason Lutes Try it now?
Thanks Tom Walker, works now!
Do you feel this “leaves blanks”?
Chris Shorb, we’ll see. Within each “common” node things are undefined beyond a list of impressions and some tables, and aside from its name the “Temple Archive” is a total unknown.
Jason Lutes that’s awesome.
Jason Lutes How did this end up working? I think next time I’m creating a DW/PW/FF game, I want to use this concept. Just room concepts and the links between them.
Chris Shorb, the basic idea is sound. I had it so that most of the nodes on this map had multiple areas within them, and wasn’t happy with the way that subsystem worked, but as a way to track locations easily it worked great. Specific geometry came into play as needed for a given situation (“the pig-men are chasing you, but you see a side opening in the mining tunnel about twenty feet ahead,” “the giant snake is on the other side of the storage room, so you can’t hit it with a hand weapon,” etc.) and the party didn’t have to map things down to the last 10′.
I will be doing it again in the future, just in a less ambitious form than the one I tried this time around.
Nice, thanks Jason Lutes. I’ll have to try next time.
Hey Jason Lutes, the girls want to go to the ancient ruined Giant City and I want to do something similar to this – Predetermine a few nodes (common/unique area types), a rough nodal map maybe and following the guidelines as you discover in play via ‘Plumbing the depths’.
I was just wondering if you ever had a table of ‘common / unique’ areas? Maybe determined by theme? Its the one area I struggle to come up with on the fly. A always seem to have endless guardrooms, twisting passageways and dusty libraries ;).