Enchanted Nimbus #6

September Issue!

Welcome back aboard the Enchanted Nimbus! I hope everyone has had a good month and a good summer as its coming to a close! September was a busy month for me as I had some vacation time and some busy activities going on at the day job. All of which will continue into the start of October.

This month’s newsletter has a blog on Lookouts, Landmarks and Lockdowns in a hex crawl. A round-up of latest OSR-style news, blogs articles and videos from other creators. And lastly the continuation of my recent reads & listens!

Feature: Lookouts, Landmarks and Lockdowns

When it comes to Hexcrawling we want our parties to explore interesting things. But often, one of the challenges with a hexcrawl is that the player’s have no idea what’s out there in the wider world. How do they know where to go? What should they checkout? Well, an obvious way to improve their quality of information is to provide them with hooks, rumors and information through encounters with creatures in the world. But what if we can give supplement their knowledge through the act of exploration? We can do that through the explicit use of certain feature types in our hexes: lookouts, landmarks and lockdowns. And better yet, these are points of interest in their own right, so you can make your hexes more rich and diverse by including them in.

Lookouts

Lookouts are high points that offer your party the chance to survey the surrounding land. By exploring these lookouts, they are rewarded with the additional context of what’s near by (or within a couple of hexes from them). Lookouts are all about offering the player’s sight lines and vision into what’s nearby them.

Now, the amount of detail they’ll be able to glean is somewhat limited. Of course, they can’t see the hidden dungeons or the ogre’s hideout in the woods. But they can see the woods, or the mountains that are beyond it. That type of advanced knowledge can help in their preparations as they decide where to move next and what they’ll be faced with when they get there. Lookouts also allow your players to perceive Landmarks, which we’ll talk more about in the next section.

Lookouts can be simple, such as a small hill/mountain with open sightlines. Or complex, like a wizard’s tower. Either way, you can make them into adventuring locations in their own right if you choose. Maybe something lives in the caves that snake through the mountain? Or the players have to do a small quest for the wizard in order to gain access to the top of her tower? Like all things with hex crawls, its good to vary things up and offer different challenges in different locations. No lookout need be the same! Unless you want to make them unchallenged to access, in that case the major cost to the players would be the time it takes traverse to the lookout and use it for their surveys.

Landmarks

Landmarks are major features in hex. These are immediately recognizable and the players should have free access to know about the landmarks in hexes they have entered. If your player’s are using lookouts for scouting and surveying purposes, they should be able to see any established landmarks within their line of sight (up to the GM to determine how many hexes they can see away).

Landmarks are great because they help the players navigate the world. If they see the Titanic Skeleton with his rusted sword leaning again a small mountain, then they probably have a good idea where they are (if they’ve seen it before). Getting lost is a real issue in hexcrawling, so giving your players opportunities to identify where they are can be crucial to their survival.

Landmarks can also be locations for adventuring and/or spots of social gathering. A desert oasis could be the home of a dangerous monster, or it could be the gathering location of nomadic desert tribes. Just like lookouts, feel free to mix these up in your hexcrawl design to add variety into your game world.

Lockdowns

Lookouts and landmarks are all about improving the player’s sightlines and navigability in your hexcrawl. Lockdowns would be considered the exact opposite. Lockdowns restrict vision or restrict access to parts of your map. The sheer cliffs of the Dagger Mountains. The bramble choked woods. The sickly purple magic mist that lingers in the bog. The large lake bifurcating the land (assuming the players have no boat/raft). All of these terrain features prevent the players from taking action in a certain direction. Or they make it more costly.

First, lockdowns present a challenge to the players. Is there a path through the lockdown? What is the key? That’s up for you as the game master to decide. But lockdowns are a problem for the players to solve. If they can do so, then they have this special access to the areas beyond. That can offer them a short cut or a significant advantage (mainly time and/or safety) when traversing those pathways.

Second, you can use the lockdowns to build up the sense of wonder. Throw out some rumors about what lies beyond. Maybe have a monster or artifact from those lands show up on this side of the lockdown. Build the interest about what’s out there. Hexcrawls and sandbox play are all about exploration. By adding areas where it isn’t easy for the players to get to, should get them all the more interested in trying to get there. Just make sure you are providing hints that it is possible.

Putting It All Together

The use of lookouts, landmarks and lockdowns will add a nice bit of variety to your hexcrawls. They offer ways to improve (or restrict) the player’s knowledge and navigability throughout your sandbox. And most importantly they offer the party information through the medium of adventure and exploration. Only by doing, will your players be able to gain that knowledge and that’s a wonderful tool to help encourage them to explore the sandbox around them.

Articles

• Arnold K shares his lessoned learned from Elden Ring in two blog posts (Part I, Part II). I have also done videos on Elden Ring and the OSR, so I really enjoyed his thoughts and ideas on the topic.

• Skerples shares his rewrites on low level and high level illusionist spell rewrites in preparation for the forthcoming Treasure Overhaul book.

• Ben of Mazirian’s Gardens talks about the differences between Good Lore and Bad Lore, and how to make good lore for your games.

• David at Monsters and Manuals shares A Simple Iterative Method for Module and Campaign Inspiration.

• Dwiz over at A Knight at the Opera continues sharing thoughts on monsters in the monster manuals. This time Dwiz goes through the letter H!

• Over at d4 Caltrops ktrey shared d100 - Retainer Refusals & Hireling Hang-Ups.

News

• Matt Finch & Mythmere Games has launched a Kickstarter for his latest two products. The first is the Tome of World Building, allowing you to create maps, cultures, countries, wilderness regions, and all the history and backstabbing politics of a fantasy world. The second is the Nomicon, with tables to invent fantasy names for everything you'll generate using the Tome of World Building. The set of books is intended to complete a trilogy with Matt’s famed Tome of Adventure Design.

• If you are a fan of Mörk Borg and its spin off: Pirate Borg then you may enjoy Limithron’s latest Kickstarter expanding upon Pirate Borg: Down Among the Dead.

Recent Reads & Listens

Continuing the series from Issue 5:

Fiction:

• Three Hearts and Three Lions by Poul Anderson (Audiobook)

  • This is an Appendix N read for me. I think it is one of the first novels that introduced/inspired the ideas of Law, Chaos and Neutrality. Concepts that have made their way into our beloved RPG games about dungeons and dragons.

  • The story itself is a bit lackluster. There doesn’t feel like there is enough conflict or tension. And the conflicts that do arise are relatively short-lived only to be faced with another short-lived problem further on. The story also ends in a rather anti-climatic and abrupt way.

  • Lastly, its important to remember that the book was published in 1953, so over 70 years ago. But there are some dated ideas and that would probably be skewered in today’s societal climate. But as long as you consider it a product of its time, I think its fine.

  • Rating: 5/10

• The Hallowed Hunt by Lois McMaster Bujold (Audiobook)

  • This is the third book in the World of the Five Gods trilogy. Its also my least favorite. It is by and large a completely separate story from the other two and it just didn’t resonate with me as well as the first two.

  • All of the stories have to do with the examination and the corruption of souls, and what happens to the dead after they pass on from the world. This one did have some interesting ideas and concepts that could be lifted for an RPG campaign. I did enjoy the “twist” in the story towards the end. But I felt like the main characters were just a bit uninspired.

  • Rating: 5.5/10

• The Complete Chronicles of Conan by Robert E. Howard

  • I’m continuing my way through the collection. Its slow going as I usually read a bit before bed each night. The stories are entertaining if not a bit formulaic.

  • Rating 9.5/10 (I’ll keep it here for now)

RPG Materials:

• Wind Wraith by Lazy Litch.

  • Wind Wraith is a toolkit that you can use to generate your own fantasy post-apocalypse ocean world, complete with scattered islands, factions, ships, and ancient arcane machines. Play as the descendants of the survivors of a great flood, explorers in a fallen world, as they build and upgrade their ship and crew. Attempt to unravel the mysteries of the past and survive with limited resources.

  • I’ve only just begun to skim the book. The artwork is great giving off that dark fantasy vibes. The content reminds me of the 1990’s movie Waterworld albeit with more fantasy. Lots of great tables and tools to make our your own waterworld sandbox and explore that with your players.

Videos

Daniel at Bandit’s Keep talking about emergent player character arcs.

Mr. Welch breaks down the entire Mystara gazetteer line in his mega-video:

Ben at Questing Beast reviews Jason Sholtis’s Completely Unfathomable, a gonzo, weird fantasy setting that looks like a lot of fun because of how hard it commits to the theme:

On my Earthmote Channel, I show how to make powder kegs with the use of establishing NPC conflicts and fights:

I also talk about how I run factions in my sandboxes and the systems I use to advance their agendas to give the world a dynamic feeling of things happening around the PCs: