The Town and The Table

The Town:

The adventure is in the wilderness, not the town — As per previous posts, be careful not to change the focus to urban adventure in The Town instead of exploration out in The Wilds. Once you have the characters start talking to Town NPCs, you'll will have a perverse desire to stay in town and look for adventure there. “Town game” was a dirty word in West Marches, and that carries over to #hexplore24. Town is not a source of information. You find things by exploring, not sitting in town — someone who explores should know more about what is out there than someone in town.

The Town is for rest, recuperation, recruiting, and resupplying for the next foray into the wilderness. 

The Town is safe and boring, The Wilds are wild and dangerous and where all the action is.

The Table Map:

One of the major ways information is shared will be the table map. 

"When the game first started the PCs heard a rumor that years ago when other adventurers had tried their luck exploring the West Marches, they had sat in the taproom of the Axe & Thistle to compare notes. While trying to describe an area of the wilds, a few thirsty patrons had scratched out a simple map on the top of the table (an X here, a line here). Over time others started adding bits, cleaning it up, and before long it had grown from some scratches to a detailed map carved into most of the surface of the table showing forests, creeks, caves, ominous warnings, etc. Where was that table now? Gone, but no one was sure where — maybe carried off as a souvenir, smashed in a brawl and used for kindling, or perhaps just thrown out after it was too scratched to rest a drink flatly." ~ Ben Robbins

For #hexplore24 the table map is represented by a blank hex map with The Town located in a hex at an extreme edge.

The map is divided up into 5 or 6 mile hexes. I'll be using 5-mile hexes as laid out in the Wilderness Hexplore workbook. You'll want to use a numeric hex grid, for easy identification of hexes explored. I'll provide two examples in the resources that you can download and/print out.

The overall goal is not to fill in every hex on the map, though you can certainly try.

If a party fails to make it back to The Town, their progress never makes it to The Table Map. This can be achieved in a couple of ways. One way is to annotate the map in pencil first, and once the party (or surviving member) successfully returns to the safety of The Town go over the pencil with an ink pen (representing the act of carving into the table). If the unfortunate TPK occurs...erase the penciled portion. This keeps Referee knowledge verses character knowledge from bleeding into each other. New characters can only use what's permanently "carved into the table". This method can bring heartache if the party spent months in The Wild, failed to return...and all of that progress is lost. Another method is to randomly determine the direction the party intends to explore. This should be the last die roll during a session, and represents the plans made by the characters while sitting at the proverbial campfire. A simple d6 clockwise from the last direction of travel will suffice. The next day, one of the first rolls of the session will be whether or not the party begins lost from the get-go. Most old school games use a static 1-n-6 chance for getting lost, I'll personally be using a page out of the 1e AD&D DMG for my own adventures. A scan of the page will be included in the resources I'm putting together. This method allows you to keep your map annotations, but doesn't guarantee that the characters will ever stumble upon anything they don't actually know about. It represents what players in a normal game might do, and takes control out of the Referee's hands. Personally, I'll probably do a combination of both. Randomly determined direction of travel, and erasing anything that isn't marked in pen should the situation arise where a TPK occurs. 

In the next post I'll go over characters and how to use them in Hexplore24...