Initial Thoughts...
To begin, I just wanted to say that this whole experience has been a wild one. One would imagine this whole exercise to be boring or lonely, but in the end this procedural experience has been like an interactive novel where I simply operate as arbiter of rolls and rules.
I realized quickly that this whole process can be very time consuming, and that is very unfortunate. Compared to the #dungeon23/#dungeon24, #hexplore24 has been a matter of either a 5 minute exercise or a 2 hour one. I am certainly picking up the pace as I go, slowly but surely getting pretty reflexive with my efforts; roll a d6 here, a d8, got a 1 so I roll a d12 - and presto I've got a castle to get creating. But in the end, I think I have made some choices that have made it a little harder to manage. To put a bookend on this intro, I have seen this little campaign of mine take on a life of its own and it has been rewarding and exciting.
Time...
I can't stress this enough: for this whole project to work out I will need to find a way to strike a healthy balance with this whole exercise. Since some of these days are bound to be simple, traveling only two hexes or so, finding nothing of note, it would seem that some will be quick and easy. Unfortunately, the more efficient I get with traveling (using horses, etc.) the more hexes I will end up in and the more places I will need to generate procedurally. Perhaps in the future when the characters are traveling only throughout previously explored hexes this won't be as much of a chore, but we shall see I suppose.
The Lands...
The lands of this region have slowly but surely taken shape, and compared to my first experimental run on this procedural generation it is more or less of the same sort of variety and design. Interestingly enough, there isn't much for marshes, bodies of water, mountains and hills, but the plains and forests have been plenty. This has been pretty nice when needing to cross vast distances as the plains offer no penalties to movement, whereas marshes and mountains would bring travel speed to a grinding halt. Overall, I love seeing the map come to life, and the locations of note have been really interesting as well.
The Locations...
This really seems like the most exciting element of this whole project. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like I have had the greatest variety with locations. So far, I have gotten 4 castles, 1 temple with a village, 1 ruin site, and 1 lurid lair. Having to make sense of these castles has been a bit tricky, especially considering their ownership being zombies (abandoned), lizardfolk (hostile and numerous), kobolds (hostile and numerous as well), and dwarves (only 4 and the castle is toppled). Creating the castles' territory markers has been interesting, considering the potential for a territory war among villages or castles, but it would seem neither the lizardfolk nor the kobolds are anything but indifferent about their neighbors.
The temple I got was randomly one of the most interesting spots I've gotten so far, and it came with a village named Odjoust which was a certainly nice opportunity for rest out in the wilderness.
The ruins were not really important in the end, though the hill giant currently residing there certainly was a scary first encounter for the party.
The roads and rivers have made a world of difference and will make traveling out into the wild that much easier, plus they lead to other villages on occasion which will be a lot of help to make the wild a little more hospitable with some pitstops and taverns.
Lastly, the lair the party encountered was a doozy: a huge limestone cavern inhabited by 2 flame lizards and a heck of a lot of treasure.
The Party (Parties, actually)...
The two groups that ended up heading out into the wilderness were the gray party (a knight, a cleric, a fighter, a barbarian, a magic user, and a druid) and the orange party (a ranger, a fighter, another fighter, a dwarf, a bard, and a halfling). Both groups have seen battle, seeing mainly victory, but both have encountered death. I brought the orange party into this crawl as a way to keep the game moving while the other party was resting for a few days, and its made uncovering the map a much faster process in some respects.
The gray party got jumped by goblins in the zombie castle on their way out, having their magic user jumped and murdered in a surprise round. They returned home with a load of gems they'd gotten from some Thouls they nearly died fighting previously and gained barely any XP in the grand scheme of things. That money however did afford them some horses, which allowed them a great bit of mobility when planning their next ventures out. They arrived in Odjoust and the knight was almost killed by a thief who didn't like the party's frivolous spending in the local tavern, but subdued the thief and had them locked up. They traveled out to the lair of the flame lizards without knowing they were there, and they managed to kill the one inhabiting the lair while it slept, retrieved the treasure, and managed to get out of their even after coming across the other flame lizard (a random encounter with such eerie probability and coincidence) without fighting and instead skirting by the uninterested lizard thanks to a great reaction roll. They ended up getting lost trying to hurry back to Odjoust and instead encountered a ruined castle inhabited by a small group of neutral dwarves.
The orange party discovered the kobold castle and wiped a whole group of them without issue. They traveled up into the mountains before deciding to return home, though they ran into a large group of troglodytes with exceptional health. These troglodytes got the jump on the party with a surprise round and with their stench and 3 attacks a round, those level 1's didn't stand a chance. They lost the halfling and one of the fighters nearly immediately, and most of the rest of the party got terribly wounded. After the remaining fighter and the dwarf held their ground and killed a pair of the smelly lizards, the troglodytes rolled for morale and bolted out of there. I rolled for the treasure of these troglodytes and got an incredible amount of wealth, which was what the book said to do, so I wasn't about to turn down the magic sword and mound of coin and gems. The party were in a big hurry to get home with their low health and lack of reinforcements, so they engaged in a forced march to get back home to Hazelhedge. Luckily, having found a road by the lizardfolk castle, the party were able to really hustle and make it home.
The orange party were able to level up, getting a lot of increased health, hiring some new characters to the group including a magic user and a cleric, as well as horses and some very valuable plate armor. Needless to say, the party were lucky to make it back at all, and they certainly reaped the benefits of their successes.
The Highlights...
1. The gray party tossing some meat behind them to escape the hill giant, which gave me great hope for this being much more than just a slough of parties being destroyed by OP monsters in the wild, over and over.
2. The gray party catching the flame lizard by surprise and killing it before it could easily kill the party, scoring hit after hit on an enemy way out of their level of power. Then, slipping by the randomly generated other flame lizard (which was so very eerie to roll the exact combo necessary to get that specifically) on one excellent reaction roll.
3. The orange party barely surviving the troglodytes, I was on the edge of my seat waiting for their demise and overjoyed with the morale check, but I was really surprised by just how much wealth they'd had available.
4. The funniest was clearly the temple of Odjoust, which was a massive Epcot-style sphere made of tin, buried beneath a huge motte of dirt, dedicated to a goblin god of earthquakes and disasters named Pol, who has a holy relic buried within the sphere. The relic? a massive stone which slings random magic spells at people within the temple.
The Next Steps...
I am eager to keep moving on with this project and seeing where my characters all end up. It is safe to say that as I keep going things will get more complicated and refined, so I am sure my methods for recording this will follow suit. I will share the current map, and as time goes on I will share my mass cataloguing of every hex and its contents, once I find a good way to do so (50x50 hexes makes for one huge document.) I will do another write up of the party progress likely next week, so stay tuned for more!
The orange star is the current location of the orange party, and the same goes for the gray star. Hazelhedge is 0,49, Odjoust is 7,48.
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