Monday, January 19, 2015

Point Crawl Map, Durthos Region

In Planet Eris, campaign shared by Austin area DMs/players, I'm currently DMing an area around Durthos, "city of adventure". This area is fairly civilized, known, and small. My campaign focuses on city adventure and possibly exploring ruins / megadungeon, not wilderness exploration. All around great candidate for a Point Crawl map

The following map will be used on roll20 starting Friday (OD&D 6:30 CST, contact me if interested). Circles represent villages, city of Durthos and Valum Auster, a fort. "Heraldry" of controlling power is shown for all but two. A camp of miners too small to care about and adventurer supply boom-town outside Anatolis ruins/megadungeon which no one has control over.  I included the population of each village to provide players some perspective.  Also on "DM Layer" of roll20 I have names of NPCs, Inns, and the like for each town.  Blue triangles are "adventure" points.  Dashed red lines represent actual road.  Other lines are more abstract connections between points. Each link takes one day of normal foot travel. Except lines with blue dots are only 1/2 day.  Large red dots are "points" with nothing really interesting there and exist only to split longer routes into one day chunks. 

Clicky to embiggen
The time to move between points and if there is a link at all depends not only on distance but also more abstract factors such as knowledge of route, how often route is used, difficulty of terrain, and frankly DM fiat. But players aren't strictly limited to the connections. The links are just the easy, fast routes when they just want to get to big city and back. For example there's not even chance for encounter in northern half of map (between civilized dots). 

Compared to "hand-waving" a trip to big city, Point crawl provides more context (for verisimilitude, to riff off of, chance for unexpected, pointing out "cool stuff is on these dots, go there", etc.) for players and DM. But, aren't as "slow" to create or play as hexcrawling. What I've done here isn't the only way to use point crawl. They can also be used for traditional, exploratory crawl the wilderness as in The Hydra Collective's Slumbering Ursine Dunes. And in modified form, a way to map and run a huge ruined city. But, that is a post for another time...





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