Return Of The Mountain Hexes I

I decided to take a bit of a breather from the foliage of the Forests for some fresh Mountain Air. Alpine terrains are always interesting to me and were even the first terrain I tried tackling with this project, so it’s wonderful to return to these stony slopes.

Here's a brief breakdown of the contents of this draft:

• Help for Hikers: An ancient stone walkway
• A Mountain Lake, devoid of life
• A Scenic Way-Shrine
• Some distinctive, finger-like Formations
• Rabidly foaming Rapids

I’ll have to brainstorm on some supporting generators for Mountains (akin to all the material I’ve whipped up for Trees/Plants/Herbs), maybe a Mountain Range/Prominent Peak name generator would be useful. As always I welcome any ideas for these in addition to feedback!

These Mountain Hexes as part of my ongoing Wilderness Hexes project (browse the hexes tag on this blog for more).

Tex-Crawl/Gorgon Trail Backgrounds & Vocations

One of the first things I like to do these days when I’m contemplating Settings is to start with player facing materials.

For the Tex-Crawl project, Gorgon Trail (a Mystara-sytle Gazetteer for fantasy Texas) I went ahead and created an updated “Backgrounds & Vocations” list that tries to do some of the heavy lifting to communicate setting during Character Generation:

Ideally, as with the previous Backgrounds, these should create more questions than they answer and telegraph more of the entire world more quickly than a huge setting dump. It is also interesting to see which Backgrounds/Vocations are broadly applicable despite the setting, and how a simple tweak can completely change the tone.

The actual Gazetteer is going on 36 pages so far, and the sections on some of the really intriguing things (like how Clerics are handled, Rune-Branding, Barbed-Wire Wizards, and Hooch Magic) have been completed in their draft forms. It’s all very tongue and cheek, and the authorial voice/heavy use of idiomatic expressions is having the strange side-effect of my latent accent creep out in conversation :). I’m having to resist the urge to just go full on TROIKA! with these Backgrounds instead of something broadly compatible with B/X.

These Dwarfs Are... (d100 Table)

I’ve managed to somehow saddle myself with yet another project that I’ve been spending some spare time on. This one’s taking shape as a Mystara-style Gazetteer for a Fantasy Texas (tentatively calling it the Gorgon Trail Tex-Crawl). It’s fairly tongue-in-cheek, but it’s proving to be a fun distraction.

But I’m still hoping not to neglect this blog, so here’s another quick d100 Activities Table to liven up encounters (random, wandering, or otherwise) with Dwarfs this time. It could serve as a companion for the one I previously put together for Wood Elfs.

Feel free to browse the d100 label for similar tables I’ve posted in the past, and as always I love hearing about how they work out at your table.