*don’t worry about the economy.
basically, in an environment where the most valuable thing is food and the unit is an hour of light, all crazy things will happen. my players first big treasure/xp score was the dead bodies of their previous pcs. they also close to immediately got an ever-burning sword= ever-burning light, and then soon after figured out a hack with regenerating troll teeth + purify food and water for infinite food.
bodies are still going to be fantastically expensive and that would have all kinds of ramifications for yr local economy but check skerples words: “It will get to the point where gold is too heavy and too pointless to transport. Pouches of strange metals will adorn your back. You'll carry a sword that can cut a syllable in half but your face will be streaked with clay and muck. You'll cut your hair off and file your teeth into points, but you'll also find a machine that spins music into cloth. “
*transporation
overland transportation in our world or in medieval fantasy land or like any other setting is really easy to get: you have a cart, you have a horse, or you walk. maybe there’s encounters along the way, look there’s a tavern, etc. you can’t track that to the veins. everything is horrible climbing and caving, transportation is always difficult, you can’t carry anything heavy and pack beasts are a joke. thus the conveniences of our modern understanding of medieval travel cannot be used.
this is sort of like the veins economy, in that, it will not make sense, everyone will be cheating. for me it was: the duerger used bizarre tunnel-digging tanks, so there’s some of those around, and for the rest of it we just abstracted it into numbers of days travel. If they tried to do something difficult like carry something heavy it would multiply the travel time.
I had to occasionally describe the surroundings during travel and for that I resummarized the environment descriptions in the “large-scale map” section: “it’s like someone took an ancient city, crumbled it up, and rolled the bits into joints”. but again it’s bizarre and makes no sense- understanding the world as a series of voids is so unalike our current understanding that anything will work.
things you might wanna puzzle out:
- what “separated by a traverse/pitch” means on the exploration table (for me= someone has to do a climb check probably)
- when do you want to use the exploration table (the book sez, whenever they want to find something, or go exploring, but like, ???)
- how often do you roll for random encounters
- how do you stage a random encounter when they happen (what does the terrain look like-- a large open field is rather uncommon in the fucking veins)
*cave systems
I don’t yet understand how to make caving challenges interesting: all the excitement and danger of squeezing through a crawl may or may not translate to yr table. the cave systems I’ve generated are more succesful at arranging content underground, across a series of tunnels, as a way of making sense of things
I don’t reccomend the book’s cave system generator. it’s just easier to draw caves, or like, as I eventually did, just arrange a bunch of shapes and images and link them with lines. how long the tunnels are and how wide they are; all of this doesn’t really matter, the veins can be anything.
some maps I've actually used:
tho I have not run a real “caving exploration” style session yet so I’m not sure of the particular details of the caves arrangements and so on’s effacy in building fun challenges for the players; for me the best of it is just a way to introduce something unexpected like the only exit is in the ceiling. My guess is that you’ll eventually default to underearth style caving which is just, series of hallways that go up and down and have ladders and holes.
cave systems are also really easy ways to make a dungeon- you just arrange different bizarre things in different, bizarre caves, and the bizarre tunnels between them arrange themselves. the excuse is: caves are really like that
No comments:
Post a Comment