Image Credit: Tom Fisk
It’s been a while, but this is the sixth post in an ongoing series: my plan for a new campaign based around a West Marches open table for Old-School Essentials. So far, I’ve sketched out the home base (Greyhold), the megadungeon (the Drowned Labyrinth), and the hexcrawl (surrounding lands), and I’ve detailed one of the first levels of the dungeon (the Unfinished Halls, which I released as a free download on Patreon last month—do grab it if you haven’t). Today I want to look a bit at play procedures. It might seem a bit dry at first, but I think these tables are the thing that makes a sandbox feel real and alive.
As ever, this is all draft material and subject to revision, so do share your thoughts in the comments below.
Speaking of revision: it occurred to me recently that having ‘the Drowned Labyrinth’ and ‘the Drowned Lands’ feels a bit odd. I’m considering other names—‘the Grey Lands’? ‘North March’? ‘the North’?—but I’m not quite there yet. Suggestions welcome!
The daily loop
Hexcrawling involves a step-by-step process. Essentially, this:
- Roll weather for the day.
- The party picks a direction and declares its destination.
- Roll to see if they get lost.
- Roll for random encounter. Determine:
- Encounter distance
- Creature activity
- Reaction to party
- Describe the hex on arrival.
This is pretty much what you’ll see in the rules for Old-School Essentials, plus a new weather roll. But I’m also customizing the terrain types (some don’t fit the setting, like desert and grassland) and the random encounter tables. I’m drawing on inspiration from a few sources here: Forbidden Lands (which I’ve reviewed here), Dolmenwood (specifically the Campaign Book), and Gods of the Forbidden North, which I’m very much hoping to review soon.
Weather
The Drowned Lands—I’ll keep the placeholder for now—are damp, cool, and rugged: long winters, brief summers, and almost always overcast. (Can you tell I’m from the UK?) I want the weather to be something the players feel as they go through the seasons; it should shape the mood and atmosphere, push parties toward shelter, maybe even derail plans occasionally. I don’t need complex rules for hypothermia like in Gods, and I don’t think I need precise daylight hours by season like Dolmenwood, but I think some ‘tags’ would be useful:
- — No mechanical effect.
- V. Poor visibility. The distance at which encounters occur is halved, and the chance of getting lost while travelling in the wild is increased by 1-in-6. Missile attacks suffer −1 penalty.
- P. Precipitation of some kind (rain, hail, sleet). Treat party’s speed as 20′ slower. Tracks washed away. Building a campfire is difficult.
- W. Wind. Missile attacks at −2.
- C. Without cold weather outfits, characters must save vs Paralysis once per day or suffer −1 to attacks and saves. The effect persists until the character spends an hour warming by a fire. Wet characters must make the save once per hour they remain wet.
There might be some situations with multiple tags (eg, a rare blizzard), but the most common results will probably carry a single tag or none at all.
The seasons run roughly as you’d expect for this kind of climate:
- Winter: December–March (4 months)
- Spring: April–May (2 months)
- Summer: June–August (3 months)
- Autumn: September–November (3 months)
There will be a 2d6 table for each. Here’s winter:
| 2d6 | Weather | Tags |
| 2 | Blizzard. Whiteout, cutting wind. | V P W C |
| 3 | Heavy snowfall. World gone white and silent. | V P C |
| 4 | Sleeting. Icy. | P C |
| 5 | Bitterly cold but bright, clear skies. | C |
| 6 | Grey, damp; light snow that doesn’t stick. | P |
| 7 | Overcast, cold drizzle. | P |
| 8 | Overcast but still. Bitterly cold after sundown. | C |
| 9 | Cold fog. Muffled. | V C |
| 10 | Cold rain, strong winds. | P W C |
| 11 | Howling gale—the kind that rips at trees and shutters. | W |
| 12 | Sudden thaw. Birdsong. Dripping eaves. | — |
I’m hoping to share the other three seasons on Patreon, but they’ll follow a similar pattern.At the referee’s option, I’d suggest extreme results last 1d3 days.
Movement and getting lost
Miles per day: The number of miles a character can travel in a day is determined by dividing their base movement rate by five. For example, a character whose base movement rate is 120 feet could travel up to 24 miles in a day.
A lightly encumbered party can probably travel 18 miles a day (3 hexes) in gentle terrain like heathland. Horses help; unencumbered, they can more than double these journey times. But weather and terrain can cause real difficulties. In hills and woodland, that drops to 12 miles (2 hexes), and in mountains and mires, 9 miles. (1½ hexes—I’m not sure how half-hexes work here. I’m thinking you need to attempt a forced march to travel two hexes, but let me know in the comments.)
And then there’s getting lost. Whenever the party enters a hex, they need to roll 1d6:
- Open terrain (heath, hills, coast): lost on a 1.
- Denser terrain (woods, mire, mountains): lost on a 1–2.
- Fog active: increase the chance to get lost by 1-in-6.
If they’re lost, I roll 1d6 pick an adjacent hex and they end up there instead. Thus, a four-day expedition can easily become a six-day one if things go wrong. And that’s exactly the kind of pressure I want—the players setting out with provisions for five days and a careful plan, then having to choose between pressing on, turning back, or trying to find shelter somewhere they hadn’t intended. It all leads to interesting choices and memorable consequences!
Random encounters
This is the part I’ve gone back and forth on the most. Do I go with 2d6? 1d20? d100? Do I have different tables for day and night? Do I have one table to determine a broad category and then sub-tables for each category? Decisions, decisions . . . And how frequently should the referee roll? (Gods of the Forbidden North suggests 1/day but with different chances for each terrain type—I like this.)
I started with a single 2d6 table per terrain type, leaning on the bell curve to put the everyday encounters in the middle and the dramatic ones at the tails. It worked, but it gave me only eleven slots per table, and I found myself wanting more variety.
So, after that, I tried the two-stage d20 system that Dolmenwood uses, which is elegant. First the referee rolls on an ‘Encounter Type’ table to find out what kind of thing has shown up, and then they roll on a sub-table for the specifics (eg, what type of humanoid, what type of animal, etc). I think it works very well for Dolmenwood because it has such strong flavouring around fey as a recurring creature type, but it felt a bit forced for my purposes.
In the end, I’ve gone with a model closer to what Robert Alderman uses in Gods of the Forbidden North: a separate table for each region, potentially with different dice rolls depending on whether I want a bell curve or something more nuanced (eg, a d100). The referee can then roll separately for activity, reaction, distance etc.
Here’s an example (not playtested, but revised multiple times):
| Day | Night | Encounter |
| 01–08 | 01–04 | Red deer herd (1d6+4) |
| 09–13 | 05–08 | Wild boar (1d4) rooting |
| 14–16 | 09–10 | Giant boar (1) |
| 17–20 | — | Grazing sheep, scattered |
| 21–23 | — | Hare or fox |
| 24–27 | — | Harrier hunting low over the heather |
| 28–31 | — | Shepherd (1) with sheepdog and flock |
| 32–34 | — | Lost shepherd boy (1) |
| 35–38 | — | Hunters (1d4) |
| 39–42 | — | Hermit (1) at their cell |
| 43–46 | — | Wandering druid or hedge-witch (1) |
| 47–50 | 11–13 | Lone pilgrim (1) |
| 51–53 | 14–17 | Lost traveller (1) — may be more than they seem |
| 54–58 | 18–22 | Greyhold militia patrol (1d6+2) |
| 59–61 | — | Pedlar (1) with mule |
| 62–64 | — | Trader caravan (3–5, with guards) |
| — | 23–27 | Smugglers (1d6) heading inland from the coast |
| 65–71 | 28–34 | Outlaws or bandits (2d6) |
| 72–75 | 35–38 | Berserkers (2d4) |
| 76–80 | 39–43 | Goblin scouts or raid party (2d4) |
| — | 44–48 | Bugbears (1d4) |
| 81–82 | 49–51 | Ogre (1) |
| 83–87 | 52–56 | Cultists (2d6) and their crone |
| — | 57–61 | Trolls (1d3) |
| 88–89 | 62–64 | Brownies (1d6) on a moonlit errand |
| 90–91 | 65–68 | Pixies (2d4), mischievous |
| 92–93 | 69–72 | Brown bear (1), or sow with cubs |
| 94–95 | 73–77 | Dire wolves (1d4) |
| — | 78–82 | Worgs (1d4), sometimes with goblin riders |
| — | 83–87 | Will-o’-wisps (1d3) over a hollow |
| 96 | 88–90 | Spriggan (1) defending sacred ground |
| 97 | 91–93 | Hill giant (1) tending shaggy cattle |
| 98 | 94–96 | Werewolf (1) |
| 99 | 97–98 | Doomed knight (1), wandering |
| 100 | — | Wyvern (1) circling |
| — | 99 | Banshee (1), wailing |
| — | 100 | Wraith (1) |
Dolmenwood has a fun, optional activity table to spark ideas about what a creature might be doing when encountered, but some of them are a bit too comedic (‘defecating’) or setting-specific (‘hallucinating’) for my purposes. So I made my own:
| d20 | Activity |
| 1 | Arguing with ? |
| 2 | Building/fortifying |
| 3 | Chasing ? |
| 4 | Drinking/carousing |
| 5 | Dying/wounded |
| 6 | Eating |
| 7 | Fleeing from ? |
| 8 | Hunting/foraging |
| 9 | In combat with ? |
| 10 | Journey/travelling |
| 11 | Lost/exploring |
| 12 | Marking territory |
| 13 | Mourning |
| 14 | Negotiating with ? |
| 15 | Patrolling/guarding |
| 16 | Resting/sheltering |
| 17 | Searching/scavenging |
| 18 | Sleeping |
| 19 | Tending young/nesting |
| 20 | Trapped/imprisoned |
Question mark (?): Roll another encounter to determine the other creature involved.
The Player’s Tome has rolls for monster reactions and encounter distance on pp 228–9, but I might customize encounter distance to suit terrain. The default is 4d6 × 10 yards (or 1d4 × 10 yards if either side is surprised). Justin Alexander has a great article on spot distances, which I have adapted below:
| Terrain | Encounter distance |
| Sea | 6d6 × 40 ft |
| Open shore | 6d6 × 40 ft |
| Rocky cliffs | 2d6 × 10 ft |
| Heath | 6d6 × 10 ft |
| Mire | 3d6 × 10 ft |
| Woods | 2d8 × 10 ft |
| Hills | 2d6 × 10 ft |
| Mountains | 4d10 × 10 ft |
Surprise is covered on p 228 of the Old School Essential’s Player’s Tome; morale on p 238.
Next steps
I’m going to share the other weather and encounter tables on Patreon when they’re complete. It would be fun to playtest this a bit before going further—see how it works, what needs refining. It may be, for example, that the Cold tag is too punitive, or not punishing enough. Always grateful for your comments below.
Next on ‘Building a New Campaign’: hopefully the Mist Galleries, and then maybe the Causeway or the Sea Caves, both of which are already in development. Or factions—a bit more lore to flesh them out. Stay tuned!
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