November Status Report

[philreed]

Steve has a new update at the official website:

https://thefantasytrip.game/news/202...status-report/

[Terquem]

Thanks - I think writing a hex crawl sounds interesting. I'll try to look up the example mentioned and see how that is supposed to look.

[larsdangly]

All of this sounds really exciting; it is great to see how much work and ambition continues to go into this game line.

I love the concept of bringing the 'hex crawl' style of adventure play to TFT; it is a totally natural extension of the approach the system has taken to tactical-scale labyrinth games. But I would say it would benefit from adding a bit of structure to the relevant rules so it feels something like a 'game within a game'. I.e., there should be a defined hex-crawl turn duration, a way to convert your MA into hex-crawl movements, hex-crawl actions that are performed each turn, and so forth (though perhaps that is all that is needed, other than a terrain chart and something about line of sight in outdoor spaces). A couple pages of this sort of material would go a long way toward making hex crawling its own fun form of play.

Presumably you've also given some thought to material components that would be used when hex crawling. You might look at the kickstarter called 'hexplorer' for some ideas about how that might look.

[Terquem]

Those are the sorts of ideas I put into my draft outline for a hex crawl adventure I was thinking about this morning when I realized I was not going to be able to avoid overthinking it.

[Skarg]

It surprises me to consider hex crawls new to TFT, as In The Labyrinth's Dran map seems to me to suggest that the default mode of running a campaign is a dynamic hex-mapped campaign.

I guess by hex-crawl Phil means the style where nearly every regional map hex has some pre-planned content in it?

[larsdangly]

People mean different things by this term, but my point was that if you want some new scale or mode of play to feel like a game as opposed to the 'free time' chatter between encounters, then you need to give it a little shape by way of turns, movement rules, etc. Even early forms of D&D did this in its own way.

[kommisar]

This sounds really really interesting. I am reminded of that old avalon hill game, magic realm, which is basically a "programmed" campaign. Now the combat rules were very hard to grasp but the exploration / encounter system was simple and ingenious and it was infinitely replayable.

[Steve Plambeck]

While the extended outdoor adventure doesn't require any new rules per se, it's hard to envision how it would work (as a packaged module) without any guidelines, suggested techniques for handling those things that never come up in dungeon crawls, and tables of some sort.

Now if there's no intention of writing it all up as a module others can use, it becomes easy: the GM does what the GM wants as far as daily travel, supplies, weather, etc. Having once run a huge "campaign-within-a-campaign", where I turned the northern third of our big continent/world, all wilderness, into a large scale hex map the players were free to wander (purportedly the party of PCs were explorers on a quest to find a legendary, lost kingdom near the arctic circle). Running it was significant work of course, but even more work would be turning it into a publishable module anyone else could run -- it'd probably come out a 300 page manuscript and take the rest of my life to write it all up.

[philreed]

Originally Posted by Steve Plambeck

. . . it's hard to envision how it would work (as a packaged module) . . .

I highly recommend checking out the example that Steve mentioned in his update.

[Steve Plambeck]

Originally Posted by philreed

I highly recommend checking out the example that Steve mentioned in his update.

Fever Swamp might be a great example, but I'm not about to drop 18 pounds to check it out. Which is a mute point, as Zot's suggestion to just search on "free hex crawl" turns up numerous examples and some great blogs on the topic.

And yes, that's precisely what I was talking about in my own "campaign-within-a-campaign" example. Upon further review a number of the old TFT MicroQuests do qualify as "hex crawls", but technically those were Metagaming publications, not SJG, making it perfectly true when Steve says "we have never published" one. Semantics aside, I think it's a wonderful area, the best possible area for expanding the product line, and I'd love to see it! Doubt I'll write any, but I'll definitely buy them all.