Random Terrain without a Map

[talysman]

A recent discussion on the Hill Cantons blog about playing wilderness adventures without a map (what he calls "pointcrawl", in opposition to "hexcrawl") raised the question "How would you do this if you were playing solo?" In other words, is there a random terrain generation system that doesn't rely on hexes or squares to work?

Turns out, not so much.

So, I adapted some earlier tables I made for a random hexcrawl system to create a new mapless approach.

Random Hexless Terrain Tables

It's a pretty simple, stripped-down system for generating random wilderness, focusing only on locales of interest and not the intervening terrain. You'd still need tables for random monsters and either random dungeon tables or a bunch of pre-made dungeons to assign where appropriate.

In a day or two, I'll post a walkthrough for creating a random area and routes to nearby points of interest. I'll probably be doing a third post on options and alternatives, too.

[tetramorph]

Talysman -- darn it, man, why do you always come up with this cool stuff right when I am about to try out one of my own half-baked DYI house rules?!

I had worked out a random terrain generator and weather generator, for my house rules, modified from that suggested in Chainmail. (I am still proud of it, but will now probably not stick with it!)

"Curses, back to the drawing board!"

Seriously, this is an awesome idea and, to me, not unrelated to the following thread:

odd74.proboards.com/post/150802/thread

In the above thread, folks started talking about generating the dungeon after determining the random encounters. I feel like you are suggesting something exactly parallel to that but for the "hex" crawl. Really, it should be a "wilderness crawl," right?

Drawing the dungeon first, determining the "terrain" of the "hexes" first, is very war-gammy, and reflects our roots. But, if there is one piece of more contemporary RPG theory that I am fairly convinced by it is that the fundamental unit of an adventure is an encounter, not a "room," or a "hex."

It is making me rethink how to draw "map," both dungeon and wilderness.

I will use your good ideas to inspire ones for my own campaign. I will still probably use HXs as a unit, but they will come after I've described up-coming encounters, etc.

Thanks!

[talysman]

Thanks!

There's another post up, this time a walkthrough on how to actually use the wilderness tables, including a few extra tidbits like the location of dungeons and handling dead ends.

9and30kingdoms.blogspot.com/2014/11/example-of-hexless-wilderness-creation.html

[talysman]

Update:

The conversation that started all this was originally about impromptu solo wilderness adventures without a map. I just posted some rules that specifically address solo games.

9and30kingdoms.blogspot.com/2014/11/solo-random-wilderness-crawls.html