Thinking about Blocks and Neighborhoods

Alexis' recent series of posts on urban game structures has got me all abuzz. I love running games in cities. Since starting to work on my world, I've begun every game in some city that has played a huge part in whatever the players do. I also am aware that I don't do nearly as good a job of creating functioning cities, that is, cities that offer the kind of depth Alexis describes.

The metaphor that has got me all excited is the 'block,' a contiguous area within a town or city that:

• The block should provide some specific purpose for the players' use.  The beach is a source for transport across the sea; it accumulates fish which can be purchased.  It is a place where boats are repaired.
• The block's residents should have a character, based on what they do and what they respect.  The people of the beach respect people who can do for themselves; who can fish or sail; who can do a hard day's work; who don't consider themselves superior because they possess wealth, status or intelligence.
• The block should be a source for adventure.  The beach offers the opportunity for smuggling.  Or to block smuggling.  It is the natural entry point for raiders who come from under the water.
• The block should provide an advantage for the player's well-being.  The beach is a good place to rest; swimming is a restorative, relaxing activity; so resting there heals hit points faster.

[text from here]

where the beach is Alexis' example of a block, outlined here.

Prior to Alexis' posts, I'd been using the idea of neighborhoods, something from Zak Sabbath's Vornheim game supplement. Boiling the concept down to what I'd actually been using, a neighborhood is a large region of a city with a distinct character. The key difference between neighborhoods and blocks is size. Traditionally, I've been using somewhere between 3 and 6 neighborhoods per large city.

Additionally, each neighborhood is geographically amorphous - what is relevant to me at the table is not how big each neighborhood is but how the neighborhoods connect. If my players antagonize a group of people prevalent in one neighborhood, they need to be careful how they move through that neighborhood and that may restrict access to other parts of the city. Over time, the party needs to cultivate people and places that give them safe access through different parts of the city, something like knowing which house at the edge of town has a cellar that opens beyond the gate checkpoints or having a friend in the guard who will let the party join patrols through a nastier area of town.

My challenge with working with neighborhoods was a question of scale - what exactly should be in each neighborhood, and how do I manage them, a.k.a. how "big" is a neighborhood. Thinking of a neighborhood as a self-sufficient collection of blocks neatly fixes this problem. So, to describe how I want to be thinking about cities going forward, I've adapted Alexis' bullet points from above.

• Each city is divided into a small number (2-6) of neighborhoods roughly separated by sociopolitical power. A town consists of 1-2 neighborhoods.
• Each neighborhood is a self-sufficient urban entity, which means that there are places to shop, eat, sleep, and relax in each neighborhood. Typically, only one group of people exerts control over a neighborhood, and if the same organization controls multiple neighborhoods, each neighborhood is run by a separate chapter of that organization.
• Each neighborhood is comprised of a number of blocks.
• Each block provides a function that is self-evident to the players, has a distinct type of inhabitant with a defined set of norms and values, offers easy potential for adventure, and affords access to some kind of benefit for the players.
• While neighborhoods may have similar blocks, each neighborhood has at least one unique block that is only accessible in that neighborhood.

As I look to getting my game back on its feet this coming Monday, I am excited to apply this framework to our current location and see how well it works.

The Mushroom at the End of the World

I just worked my way through half of Anna Tsing's <b> The Mushroom at the End of the World </b> and it is fantastic. It is a wonderful exploration of the edges of capitalism viewed through the lens of the matsutake mushroom and the economies/ecologies it fosters. There's a lot to chew on in the book, but one of the sections stood out to me in particular as a tabletop player.

Mushroom foraging is an acapitalistic endeavor. While capital exchanges hands (foragers trade mushrooms to buyers for cash, buyers exchange the mushrooms for cash from more centralized buyers who eventually trade mushrooms for cash from consumers), the foragers and buyers do not reinvest the cash into the business - they do not consolidate capital. Foragers are independent, loyal to no particular buyer and no part of the Oregonian mountains - they traipse into and out of public and private land, sometimes with and often without foraging licenses administered by the usually-absent state government and National Park Service. Buyers attempt to groom loyal foragers through bribes of drinks and treats and appeals to ethnic unity (ethnicity, of course, being a construct of conflict and thus highly socially-mediated), a ploy that often falls flat given the range of people and backgrounds who seek fungal gold. A buyer's chief goal is to drive the other buyers out of business. To that end, they compete for the highest prices - the higher the price, the more the highest-bidder will have to spend to buy the mushrooms such a price attracts. Thus, competition increases cost, rather than the opposite.

Matsutake mushrooms grow in forests devastated by human exploitation - they thrive on trees kept artificially alive through human intervention (fire protection) that cannot compete with hereditary giants and thus spring up in the wake of deforestation and the destruction of the natural environment. They cannot be farmed - Japan invests millions of dollars each year seeking a way to cultivate the matsutake, to no avail - they can only be stumbled upon in the woods, often buried in holes where only clever animals (humans and nonhumans alike) smell them out. Matsutake take on the characteristics of the trees on which they grow - the smell of a matsutake (already a pungent mushroom) on a piss-fir is exquisitely awful, and skilled buyers can determine the growing conditions of a mushroom from touch and smell alone (there are also insect parasites that can infest the mushrooms and spoil whole batches shipped to Japan - experienced buyers detect these only with a touch, while novices have to cut into the matsutake's white flesh).

The parallels to parties extracting goods from ruins, themselves the remains of human-led destruction, are obvious. There is a potential for our games to straddle the line between capitalistic and anticapitalistic endeavors, and I wonder if our love of fixed-price commodities, of easily-quantifiable treasure, is the reason that anticapitalistic potential is so rarely realized.

I both adore and hate the idea of the megadungeon. I have one in my world and not a single party I've run has ever expressed any interest in spending a prolonged period of time in there, plumbing the depths - while the cash is good, it is too lethal a place. Logistically, a meaningful megadungeon is almost an oxymoron. Yet, while I cannot imagine my players excited about seeking mushrooms in the Oregonian mountains (something great for video games and not so great for tabletops), I know that players do get excited about dungeon delves, and the resulting dungeon-market economy would function exactly as Tsing describes the matsutake buyers market. But to create such an environment, I have to do away with goods with easily-discernable value: no coins, no antiquated paintings, no clockwork mechanisms.

One of my design goals is to present an example of postcolonial D&D, building a game that does not reify structural racism and other exploitative structures. If that shit isn't OK in my other media, why should it be OK in my game? Tsing's matsutake economy recontextualizes one of the most common forms of labors in D&D into a mode of being in between capitalism and anticapitalism. Tsing writes that the true "good" exchanged between the buyers and foragers is the exercise of freedom. The money is secondary to the ability to live in refugee-style camps in the Cascades, outside the oppressive systems of contemporary life, which describes many of our players to a T.

Specificity

One of the key problems with the Settlement Campaign idea is that it is so broad. That broadness is also one of the core features that makes it such an appealing idea. However, while there are components common to many Settlement Campaigns, each such endeavor will be unique because of the differences in topography, climate, geology, hydrology, etc. I talked about creating a hyper-snowflake setting and ruleset, but in trying to represent the Settlement Campaign, I tried to reach too broadly, focusing more on universality than the specificity that I want to promote within game design.

So, in service of that specificity, I drew the (most of) the rest of the continent within which the Sea of Shadows is located. It currently lacks a name, but names are complicated beasts and I like to leave those to the end of the process. I do have some names, areas of my world that have been bouncing around in my brain for years but I've not wanted to develop (as I tried to focus on just the Sea of Shadows itself). While Guol, Panumbra, and the Wintry South will continue to occupy the furthest-back burner, it is nice to know where they are on the map, how they relate to each other topographically, and so on. It is also humbling to see that this world which has occupied my thoughts for 5ish years occupies just 40 squares of my sheet of graph paper - despite how much work I have put into this project, I have barely scratched the surface of all there is to accomplish. It is humbling, but it is also somewhat freeing; I am still beginning this endeavor - despite the progress on my game book, I have not come close to any sort of ending.

Additionally, and this was the original goal of the exercise, I now have places for my settlers to settle.

Wildcrafting

I am chagrined to say that I did not have wildcrafting/foraging rules in my game until earlier today. Maxwell's question prompted me to look, realize my problem, and begin fixing it.

The first problem is definitional. As I outlined in my previous posts, there are two different ways to use this skill. The first, and more common one, is to harvest food from the wilderness, as part of travelling through a location. The second use entails reliably harvesting food from an area over time. Most forage rules only offer a way of dealing with the first, but I'd like to expand the use of this skill.

I am inspired in this approach by Alexis' Hex Generator 2.0 which, drawing from his Civ IV posts, lists different food sources in wilderness hexes. Each source contributes 1 or more food which then sustains predator populations. It's an elegant top-down system (literally, as large hexes are divided into smaller and smaller ones until we reach an approximately 3mi hex), but I wanted something a little more bottom up.

Anyone can pull a bunch of grass from the ground and eat them. Wildcrafters, first and foremost, know what plants are safe to eat (and what parts of those plants are safe to eat), as well as how to find them. Different environments present different levels of risk.

Being simplistic, I have three categories of risk, high, moderate, and low, which reference both the prevalence of innocuously poisonous plants as well as the threat of local predators. The Sahargeen jungle, a rain forest, is high risk for both of those reasons. The scrubland beyond the jungle's edge is far less risky as there are fewer predators and few toxic plants. Low-risk areas require Apprentice Wildcrafting, moderate-risk ones need Journeyman Wildcrafting, and high-risk regions call for Specialist Wildcrafting. Attempting to forage beyond your level of competency requires a check, and failure indicates that either the forager gets a random encounter while alone in the wilderness or the harvested food is potentially poisonous.

Food availability depends upon the environment, its vegetation and topology. Each foraged region provides a number of "nodes", renewable sources of food - a game track, a berry patch, a gloomy mushroom grove, an excellent fishing spot, etc. The number of nodes varies, as one might expect.

Dense: 3-7 nodes

Moderate: 2-5 nodes

Sparse: 1-3 nodes

Dead: 0-1 nodes

I use a modified 2d6 roll with the highest possible outcome on the two most extreme results on each end (2,3,11,12), and then reducing the number of nodes found by 1 moving towards the center until reaching the minimum value. This gives a consistent 1/6 chance of getting the maximal result, but strongly varies how much one might find in the middle.

We say that 1 node provides enough food for 1 person and we're done.

Sort of. If all we care about is that first usage of wildcrafting, then we are done. But I want to make this skill more useful, so we need to complicate the model by introducing the idea of overharvesting.

Staying in one location and continuing to forage depletes local resources and teaches animals to avoid the area. It's not a sustainable practice. A common guideline I've discovered in the interwebs is to harvest 25% of what is present. If we take that literally, then in feeding 3-7 people, we are drawing from 12-28 nodes.

OK, so there is a lot more food present than is being harvested. What does the original number signify, then? It is the amount of food that can be harvested in a day's work, drawing equitably from a subset of the nodes available. The wildcrafter needs to choose how much food they wish to harvest, knowing how much food is available before the area is depleted and needs a year to recharge.

Thus, if the party will be staying in an area for a while, they can't just set up camp and stay there - foraging will eventually remove all of the available food. Travel time to other areas to harvest reduces the time available to actually forage, commensurately reducing the amount of food acquired, as well.

Obviously, I'll need to run this at the table to see how it works, but I feel like this is a workable solution. I think Master and Grandmaster Wildcrafters would be able to do more with what they found, essentially increasing the number of nodes available.

Die Zauberflöte

I am embarrassed. As a musicologist, my training (primarily) deals with Western Art Music ("Classical" Music or dead-white-guy music). One of those dead white guys was this dude named Mozart, and he wrote an opera about a flute which has magical powers, the Zauberflöte (literally, "magic flute") that takes place in a quasi-medieval environment with witches and curses and princesses. And it never occurred to me, until Jon Miller's comment, to mine it for D&Dables.

Short synopsis ofDie Zauberflöte:

Act I

Prince Tamino is attacked by a giant serpent and faints

The Queen of the Night appears, kills the serpent, and vanishes

The professional birdcatcher, Papageno, (costumed as a birdman) enters the scene just as Tamino awakens

The Queen of the Night reappears, gives Tamino a quest to rescue her daughter from the evil sorcerer, giving him the titular Magic Flute, which transmutes grief to joy, and some magic bells for protection

Tamino and Papageno set out to rescue said maiden

Pamina, the maiden in question, failed in her most-recent attempt to escape and is rechained by the slavemaster (who happens to be black)

Papageno bursts on the scene and is so horrified by the slavemaster's blackness that he flees (while the slavemaster is also revolted by Papageno's birdman appearance. Yay 18th century racial norms…)

The "evil sorcerer" appears and, surprise surprise, is actually a good guy (since if you have two magicians in the 18th c., the evil one is always female) who allows Tamino and Pamina to get married (because love at first sight and, well, it's an opera and that's what ingénues do in opera) if Tamino can pass some manly trials of reason and love of nature and other Freemason-y things.

Act II (this act is better than it looks, but it's less interesting for our purposes)

Tamino passes the trials

The Queen of the Night is pissed

Conflict is resolved through magic

Everyone gets married

Things to pull out of this opera:

2 magic items: the Zauberflöte and protective bells (all bells are magical for most of European history, and it is a terrible shame that most people have forgotten this. I need to talk about bells in a way that probably steals from Garth Nix's Abhorsen series).

Creatures:

Giant serpent (meh)

Birdpeople (yes!) that talk to birds and can look like people or like bird-people and have difficulty finding other members of their species

Bigger things:

Unproblematic Patriarchy (nope. I want to be done with that part of D&D's history. Thank you very much)

Women and night and magic and mystery

Men and day and order and logic and reason and "nature"

Unproblematic Racism (Ibid., Ibid. Just nope)

But I will take conflict via cultural misunderstandings and lack of communication, potentially leading to meaningless hostility and generation-spanning conflicts between "men" and "monsters"

Family Drama (yes)

The top-level conflict in the opera is between two divorced parents (the two magicians) and their approach to parenting. That is super cool. We should think more about what happens when two married archmages get into a pissing contest. (Maybe that's where the Owlbear comes from…) This is simultaneously totally banal and utterly fantastic, which is perfect for D&D.

Overall takeaways:

The emergence of the Zauberflöte, just as Alexis is working on a metric to measurehappiness is perfectly timed. Once he gets to a conclusion, I will adapt it to my world/rules and have a brand-new artifact.

I need to spend a lot of time thinking about how bells are fundamentally magical objects (and how that ripples through everything)

A reminder that NPC motivations are often simple, personal things that can explode into huge issues. We don't learn that the "evil sorcerer" and the Queen of the Night were married and had a daughter (Pamina) until late in Act I at the earliest - there is no reason for the PCs to know that the reason they've been asked to burgle the townhouse is because that's where the cheating spouse likes to go with their special friends. Or that the reason there are two teahouses on the same block that conduct nightly raids of the other is that the owner of a business, a retired adventurer, promised his vast wealth to whichever kid could operate the best teahouse and then died before specifying how the teahouse was to be judged, but left the clause in the will, and through the generations the cause of the endless rivalry has vanished into memory but the feud remains virulent as ever. It's a reminder that when things happen to affect our players, they do not need to be only one level deep or exceedingly complex - seemingly-"ordinary" relationship dynamics can spawn something vast and sweeping, inviting the players to investigate and find out the small thing that has generated the larger issue.

Tabletop Soundscapes

The required materials for a tabletop roleplaying game are: paper, pencils, and dice. That's a common formulation. Except, of course, you need a surface upon which one can write. You also need a physical space (that will include that writing surface) in which the game's actors assemble and partake (I'm not going to address online games, like the one I'm in right now). Food is often a part of the rpg experience, as are character miniatures, battlemats, terrain things, beer, computers, books, outlets for those computers, etc.

Having access to a "good" space for tabletop rpgs is a question of privilege - a table in the cafeteria will suffice, but there are a number of factors that are desired, including physical isolation (allowing you to play without casual interruptions by passers-by) and sonic isolation (insulation from non-game-related sounds). The first is fairly straight-forward - everyone understands that playing a tabletop rpg does not work well in an environment full of distractions and interruptions, which leads to us playing in dorm rooms, basements, classrooms late at night, or (most desirably) within the comfort of our own home.

Sound is a fundamental part of the experience - having a sonically static environment facilitates communication as everyone is able to speak at the same volume and be equally heard. The shuffling of character sheets, scratching of graphite, clacking of keys, and clattering of dice underscore the conversational interaction that is the heart of the rpg experience.

This sonic underscore or soundscape interacts our behavior, as we associate specific habits with a specific sonic environment. Imagine the differences between the background sounds of an ER, coffee shop, and office - our impressions of that space, the feelings these spaces trigger in us can be summoned by listening to an audio recording of that place.

Some DMs like to use music's ability to evoke a sense of place consciously, by playing music appropriate to whatever game situation is at-hand. A cursory search for "rpg music" yields a number of sites offering themed tracks (medieval tavern, graveyard, battle music, and so on) to aid the musically-inclined DM in choosing appropriate music.

There are some structural problems with the repertoire given - each track, rather than being the soundscape of whatever environment is referenced, gives a musical representation of that soundscape. If you listen to the "Lost Mine" track, you'll see what I mean. There's very little that's 'mine'-specific, and a whole lot of chromatic brass descents - it sounds like a film score, not the sounds of an actual place. Now, film music is awesome, but it necessarily works to drive tension in the foregrounded activity, building towards a particular moment. In a movie, you can tailor the music to work alongside the events displayed. In a live rpg, though, that kind of synchronization is impossible, and what we're left is an awkward tension build-up communicated by the music that is totally separate from the actual game-playing itself. At best, the players don't notice it. But what usually happens is the music distracts from the experience of playing - it pulls focus from the character's actions (out of the game world) into the real one, a concrete [albeit sonic] reminder that we are engaged in the act of playing the game. This decreases immersion, breaks dramatic tension, and so on. And then, of course, there is the question of what to do when the track ends. Does it loop? Is there a playlist that seamlessly plays a bunch of 'similar' music in a row, at least until the scene changes and we need a new playlist for the new game environment?

The reason for these problems is how the DM conceives of music in their game. While music can evoke a time and place, the players are already doing that in their heads. Those of them who can see mental images have built some visual representation of the described space, those of us who can't have figured something else out. The music does not need to do this work for us. Instead, the function of music during a running is to discipline the rpg soundscape - to maintain a constant sonic environment (changing enough that the static-ness is not a noticeable feature), a series of sounds that underscores every game interaction. Having music (quietly) playing in the background, covering the silences, helps keep players focused because there is now no silence to fill with awkward jokes or tangents that pull players out of the game world.

If the bulk of the music touted as being "for rpgs" is schlock for this kind of work, what can we use? I like to use music that falls into the "ambient" genre - Alva Noto and Brian Eno right now, and more as I acquire it. The tracks are usually sonically-similar (facilitating a more seamless ending of one track and beginning of the next) and don't often feature the kind of volume or rhythm intensification found in most of rpg tracks (which reduces the music/tension conflicts). The downside is that they are entirely electronic music, which can unnerve some people (it can have a strong association with horror films) and can trouble people with expectations that "music" should mirror or reflect the game environment rather than reflect the fact that the game is playing.

But, music can be a valuable DM tool, just as battlemats, custom miniatures, and game props  (they can also be terrible - it depends upon the quality of the product). It's important to know that we have more choices than Yes music and No music.

Creating NPCs

Because my game uses a central mechanic based on a skill system, creating NPCs out of whole cloth was originally rather challenging as I needed to think through how much training the individual might have received and in what context in order to evaluate what skills they had.  I had a revelation while refining the Bard tables for my world (I'll post the revised tables when I'm done) that I'd like to share here.

As you may recall, my discipline system has 6 tiers of skill: novice, apprentice, journeyman, specialist, master, and grandmaster.  If I were to translate them to a 20-level system, I might do the following: apprentice is 1st level, journeyman 3rd, specialist 7th, master 12th, and grandmaster 18th, and the number of people of each skill level drops dramatically with each tier.

I'm representing that by rolling 5d10 for each discipline (or, if I'm low on time, for clusters of disciplines based on the NPC's trade).  Each 10 rolled increases the tier by one, with a resulting 1/100,000 odds for a grandmaster skill level.

I have a wide list of trades (I've edited the list since I last talked about them) and by placing the NPC into one of them, I can determine their general skill of competency in all the affiliate disciplines of that trade by reducing their tier by one: if I get a Master soldier, then one of their disciplines will be master tier and the rest will be specialist.

This gives me a handful of dice to roll for any character and quickly determine their abilities.  For NPCs that I know will be more powerful, I might raise the base level of their skills to Apprentice and see how much better they are on top of that with the same roll.

Adapting the Hazard Die to the Pioneer Hexcrawl

I am alive and around.  I've entrance exams in a couple of weeks and I'm spending most of my time preparing for them, as well as getting situated in Rochester.  I have been working on my world as well and wanted to share some of my progress with the Pioneer Hexcrawl.

Brendan, ofNecropraxis, has a system he calls the Hazard Die which provides the pacing for his games.  The general idea is that events happening in the game world = player engagement, so rather than changing the odds of monster or location encounters, he takes the 1d6 random encounter die and provides a different outcome for each result, so that something happens almost every day.  The context in which the die is rolled informs the exact outcomes.  Now, Brendan's overall approach feels more like the complicated board games I enjoy and less like a tabletop role-playing game, but since overland exploration is the most board-game-like structure within D&D, the two ideas are well-suited to each other.

Now, I disagree with Brendan's premise that stuff needs to happen every day, especially on a journey that might take months in-game.  In fact, I'm quite all right with a week or so passing without anything of note happening - that will provide time for the players to practice some self-care.

So, rather than the full-on Hazard die, I propose rolling 1d6 each day.  On the result of your favorite number, roll again to see the kind of event incurred.  This is all bog-standard stuff, except for the addition of travel hazards and resource depletion.

Roll	Outcome
1-2	Wandering Monster
3	Unique Location
4-5	Travel Hazard
6	Resource Depletion

Travel hazards impede progress for a certain number of days.  They will be terrain-dependent (probably no mudslides while traversing the desert), and can either be waited out or soldiered through (albeit with a possibility of damaging a wagon or animal).  I'm including here information for the Wildlands, a savanna and grassland that lies on the eastern edge of my world.

Roll	Travel Hazard (Wildlands)
1	Wildfire
2-3	Thornroots
4-6	Herd migration
7	Surprise swamp
8	Heat wave

Wildfires are a constant danger while on savanna and grasslands and can be caused by lightning strikes, perpetually-burning ground fires, sparks from rockslides, or a number of other environmental factors.  Wildfires are one of the major ways a savanna and grassland biome maintains itself, as the fires will kill off saplings but leave older trees while only burning the grass shoots, not the roots.  Determine the origin direction of the fire by rolling 1d6 and then determining which hex edge corresponds with the number rolled, and has a 3 in 4 chance of erupting some 2d6*10 mi away and a 1 in 4 chance of becoming visible only 2d10 mi from the party.  The fire's direction depends upon the time of day: daytime fires travel eastward (away from the sea), while nighttime fires travel westward (towards it).  Wildfires travel about 9-12mi/h, so if the wildfire menaces the party, determine its speed as 1d4+8mi/h.  Smoke will reach the party first, panicking the animals and potentially causing death long before the fire arrives - when the fire is within 20 miles, characters will need to start making Athlete (or Constitution) checks to avoid damage from smoke-inhalation, unless characters protect their airways with magic or wet cloth.

Thornroots are a kind of thorn-covered vine that outcompetes most grass and shrubs.  They are fire-resistant and deal 1 damage per 10' movement to unarmored creatures.  Hacking a path for a wagon slows progress by half.

Herd migrations: a herd of large herbivores are migrating across the path of the party and will take 1d3 days to finish.  On the Wildlands, the crossing animals would probably be antelope, gazeer, or buffalo.  Additionally, the next hex will have no grazing available.  Interfering with the migration could cause a stampede.

Surprise swamp: the area ahead is saturated with water but deceptively so - after traveling into the next hex, the lead animals (and wagon, if the driver fails a Wisdom check) will become mired in mud.

Heat wave: temperatures in the area reach dangerous heights.  Anything in full sunlight for more than an hour (or who enter combat) must save or suffer heat exhaustion (reduce Con, Wis to 1/2 usual and take 1d6 damage every hour not resting.  Cured by 1d3 days of total rest out of the sun).  Characters in any armor do not get the save to avoid heat exhaustion.  Resting is not possible while the heat is so high: no hp can be recovered nor injuries healed.  Water requirements for all creatures are doubled during the heat wave.  The heat wave lasts 1d4 days with an exploding die.

Resource depletion consists of just that: events that will either remove or require the additional consumption of the party's supplies.  While I think that my original idea to give wagons hit points has merit, the implementation of it also requires taking choices away from the players - having wagon damage events be part of the travel hazard seems a better solution.  Whenever this result is rolled, all wagons make a saving throw based on their condition.  Those that fail roll on the following table.

Roll	Resource Depletion
1-4	1d8 wheel spokes snap
5-6	Axle breaks
7-8	Wagon tongue breaks
9	Water barrel rots
10-11	Animal goes lame
12	1d4 items go missing

As I stated before, whenever a wagon suffers damage like this, I'd recommend rolling for the next structural effect (roll a d8 on the table instead of the d12) which will take place whenever the wagon next fails its saving throw and subsequently rolls a wagon-damage result.

Wagon wheels have 12 spokes and can operate as long as half of them are still present.  However, whenever a wheel loses spokes, roll 1d12.  If you roll higher than the number of spokes left, the wheel collapses, breaking all of the remaining spokes and requiring a new wheel.

Lame is a catchall term for herd animals that have developed some difficulty walking.  The cause can be as benign as a pebble lodged in the hoof or as problematic as an infected abscess or damaged tendon.  In all cases, the animal cannot bear weight and can travel no faster than a slow walk (1-2 mi/h).  Curing the animal requires properly diagnosing the problem and then applying proper treatment.

And it looks like I need a whole post on wagons and beasts of burden, which will come later.

Pioneer Companion Clusters

The past couple of posts had lots of ideas but no executions or suggestions.  I lost my internet due to some outside factors, and that gave me time to work without its distractions, and that produced some excellent ideas for handling NPC groups in the context of this expedition.

First, stop thinking of each NPC as an individual entity.  Instead, think of NPC clusters, groups of people who have a pre-existing relationship who are entering into the expedition's company.  The people interested in traveling far away from civilization and probably never seeing it again are of a specific sort, and the list is tailored to groups of that ilk.

1: a fairly self-sufficient or desperate person
2: A pair of competent individuals, or two folk drawn together by circumstance and seeking out of their particular situation.
3+: Family groups, seeking a better life elsewhere.

I'll further detail the different clusters for each size, but I wanted to present some cluster interaction rules which might be useful outside of this context.

Roll Charisma for each cluster, representing how sociable and likeable the group is as a whole.  Add the number of children in the cluster to the final result, and then determine the resulting score modifier.  Double it to determine the number of strong feelings the cluster engenders from other clusters.  Then, roll a d20 against the cluster's Charisma to determine whether the feeling is positive or negative (rolling over for negative, rolling under for positive), with the recipients determined randomly.

For example, a family of 3 (two parents, 1 kid) rolls a Charisma score of 16.  We add 1 for the kid, which is 17.  In LotFP, this gives a modifier of +2, so the family inspires strong feelings from 4 other clusters of NPCs.  Rolling the d20, we get 3, 5, 19, and 12.  We interpret this to mean that 3 other clusters view the family well, but another cluster views the family poorly.

The party is also a cluster, and for the purposes of this relationship web, use the median value of all the characters' Charisma scores.  Clusters that like, or feel neutral about, the party are under their control, as long as they act in good faith and are competent leaders.  Clusters that dislike the party are under the DM's control - not to become enemies of the party (all involved recognize that the success of the whole venture requires cooperation between the different groups), but they will grumble and look to take control of the group away from the party, if possible.  By making a meaningful, personal sacrifice, the party can attempt to change the opinion of a cluster that dislikes them.  After making the sacrifice, the character involved can make a Charisma check to influence them.

This might play out in any number of ways - a family might be quite nice, but they have a brat of a child who is insufferable and obnoxious.  Perhaps there is a very competent ranger in the company, but her brother is a drunken lout who can't do much of anything, forcing the ranger to spend most of her time helping him out.  Either way, that one person makes it hard to appreciate the cluster's company.

While clusters are happy to separate as needed for short-term tasks (the group needs to clear a tree from the trail, for example), for long-term or obviously dangerous tasks, roll a d4.  If the result is higher than the number of people in the cluster, someone from it will volunteer for the task.

Lastly, here's a table documenting the different types of clusters that can be recruited for the expedition.  The levels listed are a guideline.  As you can see, most of the people on  this trip have few skills (the families are likely all farming stock, and so would be knowledgeable about plants, planting, housekeeping skills, etc.

Size	Category	Level	Description
1	Ranger	2d3	Hunter, explorer, trapper
1	Criminal	1d2-1	Seeking new life or escaping old crimes
1	Former Soldier	Ftr 2d4	Retired, looking for quiet place to die
1	Non-inheriting child	0	Lacking trade or prospects
2	Professional Partnership	varies	Pair of hunters or master and disciple
2	Siblings by blood	0	Might have tradeskills
2	Odd Couple	0	Unusual pair, united by circumstances - 2 criminals, 2 ex-soldiers, something else
2	Romantic couple	0	Want to start a family
3	Family	0	2 parents, 1 child
3	Family	0	1 parent, 2 children
3	Family	0	2 parents, 1 grandparent
4	Family	0	2 parents, 1 child, 1 grandparent
4	Family	0	2 parents, 2 children
4	Family	0	1 parent, 3 children
5	Family	0	2 parents, 3 children
5	Family	0	1 parent, 4 children

The Pioneer Hexcrawl

This is probably going to be the most familiar part of the entire pioneer endeavor, and that presents a unique challenge.  This hexcrawl has to be different than any other hexcrawl you have ever run.  Even if your players have traveled extensive distances with wagons and gear, this will be an entirely new hexcrawl for both them and you.  This hexcrawl is responsible for setting the tone of the entire settlement adventure, introducing your players to a different way of thinking, one much more grounded in the physical reality of their characters' situation.

We'll start at the beginning: preparing for the journey.  The full traveling group should number at least 20, including player characters: if the players want to do more than build and operate a single farm, they'll need more bodies.  The more hands on deck at the end of their journey, the easier constructing the settlement will be (remember that video last post of the approx. 50 workers raising a barn in 10 hours?).  Also, some of the non-adventurers will die along the way.  That will be a consequence of the journey.

The group's makeup will factor hugely into the success or failure of the venture, with regard to both the overall skillset and the relationships between each individual member.  I'll devote a post just to talking about the expeditionary group, which is why I'm going light on the details here.

Once the group has been created, the party needs to acquire supplies.  While I love fiddling with spreadsheets and accounting and looking at all of the fiddly details, I recognize that not everyone finds it fun.  Tough.  While you, the DM, absolutely must help the party choose supplies and quantities (offering suggestions and observations frequently), when the party makes all of the final decisions, they assume the responsibility for all of their equipment.  When a crucial supply is necessary and they didn't buy it (or didn't buy enough of them), they can only get angry with themselves, as opposed to blaming whatever abstraction is used so that your players didn't have to sit through and approve every blessed item.

As a rule of thumb, the group needs enough wagons that everyone in the expedition and all of the equipment can fit into the wagons.  Give each wagon a name and character sheet and distribute them to the players.  Wagons will have hit points and take damage from terrain hazards.  When they lose all of their hit points, they break - either the wagon tongue snaps, a wheel breaks or (eesh) an axle cracks (determine this randomly, say on a 1d6, 1-3 break a wheel, 4-5 wagon tongue, and 6 break the axle).  Repairs take a half-day, assuming appropriate replacement parts are on hand.  Unlike a regular injury, determine the next kind of break the day after the first one has been repaired - so if a wagon busted a wheel yesterday and was fixed, today the DM would determine what would break next - as the expedition travels, people will keep an eye on the wagons and will notice that the axle has developed a small crack, which is fine right now, but a couple big jolts will splinter it.

Every item brought on the expedition needs to have some condition for it to not perform as expected or needed - tools need a breakage chance, stored food needs conditions under which it will spoil, etc.  These odds should be slight and conditions unlikely - but they need to be explicitly stated and recorded somewhere.

You will need foraging rules - if a full day is spent foraging, how much food can be brought back per forager?  They'll need to account for vegetation and foraging skill.  I have a Hunter skill: it is an Apprentice task to find food for 1 in the woods.  Plains and scrubland are a Journeyman task, and desert and similarly inhospitable terrain require a Specialist Hunter test, and the difference between the check result and the test's difficulty (minimum 1) is the number of people that can be fed on a successful roll.

Lastly, in addition to the normal encounters of your hex crawl (random encounters, interesting location-based encounters to keep things different and interesting for your players), you will need journey hazards that put stress upon the wagons, equipment, and expeditionary group.  Things like needing to clear a path through a forest, crossing a river, a rockslide coming towards the wagon train or a mudslide that has washed away the path.  I'm a big fan of a 1d6 encounter die for most wilderness encounters, with a check every day.  Here, I'd roll 2d6 - one to determine whether an encounter occurs or not, the other to determine the type: 1-3 for a typical hexcrawl encounter, 4-5 a travel hazard, and 6 an interpersonal conflict within the expeditionary group.

So: takeaways from this brainstorm.  The Hexcrawl section requires:

Wagon character sheets

Expeditionary group mechanics to randomly create clusters of people interested in joining the party's caravan and simulate their interpersonal relationships

Thorough equipment lists, detailing dimensions, components, break or spoilage conditions, etc.

Hexcrawl encounters including typical hexcrawl items (wandering monsters, lairs, ruins, etc.), travel hazards, and interpersonal conflicts

That's a start.