Feb 17, 2012

What Can You See When You Look Around?


This is a dice map for when your PCs are riding across the Plains of Kadiz and they stop and suddenly say "What can we see around us?" This dice map answers that questions. You use it in the typical way, dropping a bunch of dice on it and seeing where they land. The map has a little arrow pointing north so you can orient where everything is, or you can just treat that as "ahead of the PCs" if you prefer. You can find the explanations of every landform and type on this dice map on Wikipedia.

Linear features like eskers, canyons, draws and rivers are extended in the directions that the hex segment is, so that esker in the bottom right corner of the dice map runs east-west.

The numbers on the dice for the hex segments convey magnitude. For linear features like eskers or scarp or canyons, treat it as the number of kilometres they extend. For things like meadows and boreal forest, it's the number of square kilometres it covers. For things like smoke or game or sinkholes, it's the number of those things that appear.

If a die comes up "1", then the terrain features it lands on are impassable, even if they're good ones like eskers, draws or meadows, and must be circumvented (requiring skill tests as the referee considers appropriate). Meadows in the Dawnlands catch fire pretty regularly, alvar may be too broken for horses or men to cross safely, the river can't be forded, the forest is too thick to get through, draws may be at risk of an avalanche, and eskers may be treacherous footing whipped by the wind, etc.

If the PCs aren't in any special kind of terrain, the most common kinds of terrain in the Dawnlands are polje and chalk heath.

10 comments:

  1. Good one.

    For dice maps like this where the scatter of the entries also can indicate layout and direction, a D8 makes a good compass - North is whichever way the top of the triangle above the number points.

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    1. That's a good idea. It might allow me to break up the symmetry a bit more. As it currently stands, whenever I have a directional factor I have to make 6 of each entry, or at least multiples of 6, to make sure all are covered. If I can change the orientation... Hm.

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    2. Do you tend to record the landscape features your dicemaps generate as permanent?

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    3. This is for an upcoming campaign in the Dawnlands, so I haven't had to decide yet. Even though the Dawnlands has a map in the real world, no maps of it exist in-game, and navigation is by landmark and songline. I'm tempted to allow that to work in my favour by making it random rolls each time it's consulted, but I need to give it more thought.

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    4. I like the idea of navigation by songline; I'm going to have to do something with that.

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    5. Ask and ye shall receive, my friend:

      http://retiredadventurer.blogspot.com/2012/02/new-uses-for-culture-own.html

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  2. Huh. I don't think I've seen one of these before...that's pretty cool.

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    1. Thanks. I've been playing around with them ever since I found a template.

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  3. I like the design of the hexes so I started playing around with replacing your words with keyed colors (a couple of silhouettes too). It looks nice but I won't have time to finish it till the weekend.

    Anyway, I mostly wanted to post that while tinkering with it I thought it might be cool to show players these kinds of dice drops, once their characters have some experience in the area or talk to some locals, to allow players to get a visual sense of the region. For example how settled it is (wooded pastures, villages) or how much game is in the region, or how dangerous traveling here is. It would make travel choices more interesting and real. Thanks for sharing.

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    1. Thanks!

      I don't ever intend to actually touch these after I hand them to players. I don't know if you saw my article on giving them the wandering monster tables, but I tend to try to hand out tables rather than keeping them to reduce the amount of time the PCs spend staring off into space while I sit there rolling things. I have them read off the results.

      As for colours, yeah, one of my PCs last night, the guy playing the assessor in the Emern game, mentioned that he's going to start colouring in the various hex segments (probably with crayon) to make types of entries stand out more. There's a whole dimension of additional information that could be coded into the colours if you wanted to.

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