Thursday 14 February 2013

Hexology II [Travel]

Some more thoughts on hex crawling and wilderness adventures today; this time, focusing on actual travel itself. It's my submission that a DM running a game involving wilderness travel should know and love wilderness travel; it is important in running such a game to consider not just random encounters tables and pre-positioned adventure locales, but also the more subtle issues - how does it actually feel to be out in the wild? How would wilderness encounters actually play out in practice? How does the geography itself act as both threat and tool? Of particular interest to me is the question of distance (at what distance do wilderness encounters occur?) and surprise (how is it that a party of adventurers becomes surprised?). While hiking around Craster on Monday I started thinking about those questions.


This is a field of cabbages. The plants are a probably two feet high and visibility is low; it would be extremely difficult to spot an enemy in those fields who wanted to be invisible - they could simply drop down amongst the plants and submerge themselves. Moving around on your belly to stay out of sight would pose its own difficulties, however. The plant life is thick and difficult even to walk through. And, as we shall see, this being England...



...the ground is as muddy as fuck. You would be breathing in dirt lying in amongst that. It's also demoralizing merely to walk through, and I'd imagine nigh-impossible to run over, least of all in full armour. An important consideration if a band of orcs suddenly appear from the undergrowth to the left where they've lain in hiding. They're unlikely to be hidden there, though. Look also where the path leads. The choke-point in the path between the copse of trees and the line of shrub is a more-or-less perfect ambush spot. Surprise distance here could be a matter of a couple of yards.


This is the other direction for the path above. It shows the importance of the high ground. Somebody on top of that escarpment (known as a 'heugh' locally, and the site of an iron age hill fort) could see anybody moving along that path from literally miles away. Surprise distance in this scene could be half a mile at the very least.


A close-up of the above escarpment. Difficult to climb, though not impossible (I did). Those green bushes are gorse, though - it's prickly and painful and blocks movement. And if an enemy appears while you're half way up, you may as well just drop your pants and bend over. 


And the view from the top. It shows how exposed anybody would be moving in the open ground below - but also shows how difficult it would be to see somebody on the hilltop from down below. There would be almost no need for a surprise roll out here. Somebody on top of this hill would easily see anybody approaching, and could just as easily hide amongst the rocks up at the top.


A typical muddy English field - the same comments about running through that mud apply: you couldn't. If I was a band of orcs, I know where I'd be - in the copse to the left. But it's important to consider the role of animal life...


...because, although you can't see them in this photo, the woods here on the right are packed with jackdaws and wood pigeons. As soon as you approach they scatter, crying out with loud abrasive voices. Again, think about an encounter here: what would a failed surprise roll mean? It might not be that you've been spotted. It might just be that somebody has spotted the birds which you have disturbed. A nice way to build tension - the players notice a few wood pigeons suddenly scattering up ahead. They know something has flushed those pigeons. But what?


Dunstanburgh castle. People who built castles knew what they were doing: imagine trying to assault that. The House of York apparently did it during the Wars of the Roses - the solution was to blast it with cannons. Notwithstanding that, you might want to give it a wide berth - but it would have to be very wide, because it is surrounded by open ground. 


A view up the beach to the castle. Beaches aren't always sandy. Those rocks are slippery and take ages to clamber over. Again, forget running. And if you're in armour heavier than leather, roll a d6 per turn: get a 1 and you fall over.


A sheep trail. Game trails are an important way to move around, because they are usually more clear than the surroundings, but they have a bad habit of leading nowhere, or going round in circles. A bigger concern is the sheep themselves: sheep are easily disturbed, and they tend to baa the alarm when a stranger appears. Again, the surprise roll might just mean the local troll has heard the sheep warning of your arrival.


Another heugh. Plenty of places to wait in ambush for anybody walking along that boggy path.


An old limestone kiln set in the trees. There could easily be something hiding in there: and it would most definitely see you before you saw it, hidden away in the dark like that. Sneaking up on that structure would be a challenge in itself. You might be able to skirt around from behind, but the chances of being heard are still high. 


The long hard slog of a journey. Imagine walking through that. Now imagine doing that for a week. No wonder people didn't get about much in the medieval era. 

18 comments:

  1. I'm loving this series - thanks so much!

    I'm mostly familiar with the wooded highlands of Central Ontario, so it's really interesting to get a better perspective on some European terrain.

    I'll try and reciprocate with some similar analyses of my old stomping grounds.

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  2. Whenever I go camping I come home wanting to run a hex crawl. Every different type of terrain writes its own encounters. I'm also reminded of how easy it is to communicate the significance of terrain with a photograph, in ways that words just can't capture.

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    1. I'd love to create a big online database of photos of terrain for DMs to use during play - just show the players where they are on your laptop or iPad.

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    2. That's a good idea. In fact, I'd go so far to say as that's a great idea...

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    3. I'm with you guys, on all points. The examples above made me think, "And that's just in a couple parts of England!" I've just returned from a road trip through the American Southwest, and have been thinking of outdoor adventures the whole way, along with how little people actually know about terrain. For example, if you think of Monument Valley you likely think of a very flat plain with those astounding mesas rising above it. However, the ground on that "plain" ranges from sloped ancient floodplain to sand dunes to piles of gigantic boulders, with a startlingly large amount being some 20'-30' deep riverhead gulleys. There's no normal way out of the southern end: it's all giant red walls. The possibilities are endless, and that's just in that 1 relatively small (yet physically enormous) area.

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  3. It is a very interesting exercise to read the landscape in terms of how small-scale skirmish and ambush might play out within it. I spent years being a mediaeval re-enactor and engaging in simulated combats of a scale usually not dissimilar to that of typical D&D games. Things like the gorse, muddy ditches and streams, rocky escarpments and broken ground play a very important role in the tactical game at that scale. Part of combat is a chess game of trying to achieve and maintain the best ground possible while forcing the enemy to occupy the worst ground (which is not even taking into account the ideas of concealment and surprise). The photos you've taken really serve to illustrate this in a way that game materials don't often achieve.

    I agree with Edward here about the way terrain suggests encounters, in my professional life performing ecological restoration I have to move through terrain that would be ridiculously hard to fight in but I am always thinking about it. What would it be like encountering a giant in a patch of lantana on a steep and muddy hillside ?

    Great stuff! Keep it up.

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    1. Yeah, it's something I've only recently started looking at, but it's fascinating to think about. Usually DMs don't pay a great deal of attention to terrain except for obvious obstacles.

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  4. All of this suggests dispensing with the "surprise roll" or at least making a different interpretation of it - in the outdoors, the roll determines the suitability of the terrain for ambush and disposition of forces therein. Otherwise, it would be interesting to come up with a simple method for converting the 5-6 mile hex terrain into a local battle map, from which possibility of surprise could be deduced.

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    1. Or two rolls. Roll for suitability of terrain, then roll for surprise (with modifiers for terrain).

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    2. I really like this. Reading your post made me think the rolls for surprise and encounter distance are enough. The scale of the encounter, and actors' awareness of each other combined with a general concept of the terrain should be enough to spark some good improvisation for an encounter. As I DM, I know some of my best experiences have been when I had a place I had actually been in my minds-eye.

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  5. A 'terrain roll' would be the simplest way. If you give people a 30 second minigame where they get to arrange stuff.

    In 40k, if I remember correctly, one person gets to arrange the terrain and the other person chooses the side they prefer. Or maybe they take turns with terrain placement? I forget

    Choosing terrain, arranging it, placing PC and going first or second are all things that could be broken up or diced off with competative rolls, depending how long you wanted to spend on something. And depending on how much of a hippy you want to be.

    Terrain choices is something that would go quite well with an old-school random table. It might also add flavour for the setting. So for Yoo Suin you could have tables for the kind of wierd thing they would find around that particualr province. Maybe if you 'win' terrain you get to roll on the table and bang down and field of decaying yellow rice with the bones of strange animals rotting under the water.

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    1. That's a cool idea. In 40k (or Warhammer) I think you take turns to place stuff.

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  6. This stuff is cool to think about but it boggles the mind how you would actually incorporate it into a game. I mean, I can see how being aware of it would help you add descriptive flavour to the wilderness. But making it something concrete that the players could interact with? That would require a whole new subsystem(s), a whole new way of thinking about the game maybe.

    I've always been interested in the idea of playing up the camping and resource management elements of the game to a greater a degree, like D&D: Bear Grylls edition. But personally I don't know very much about camping, hiking, etc.

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    1. I do half agree with that. You can't incorporate too much into a game, but the aim is to at least make it slightly more realistic by bearing these things in mind.

      The wargamer in me would love to develop those sub-systems, mind.

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    2. You might make up several rough battlemaps using things like these photos as inspiration. Part of the maps would be ambush, ambushee and meeting engagement (mutual surprise) positions. Upon an encounter, you randomly select a map and place forces based on the surprise roll. After the encounter, you either retire the map (for a while perhaps) or alter it and keep it in circulation.

      Alternatively, you have on your hex map "10 orcs hidden on a heugh" and recreate something you saw on your walk from memory.

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  7. Re: Pigeons. Not that I've ever personally put this into practice, but I've come to the conclusion that an important part of random encounters is mundane, or at least non-combat encounters. I recall some DM relating that he told his players that they saw an old woman walking down the road, and they immediately attacked and killed her. She was, no surprise to anyone, a hag. Sometimes, it needs to just be an old woman, or pigeons. You might overdo it, obviously, but maybe the old woman mistakes the party for the bandits which have been terrorizing her village or the pigeons live near an ancient marker or whatever.

    Given how Polynesian sailors found isolated islands, like Easter Island, sometimes your random naval encounter should be "seaweed" or "cormorants".

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  8. The Bear Grylls version of D&D sounds awesome. I think it might, however, take some skillful DMing to get players excited about finding some elephant dung from which to squeeze the moisture for a drink.

    As for a terrain minigame, I think it would be easy enough to allow players to forgo attacks to move into different terrain with different benefits to attack, defence etc.

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  9. " Imagine walking through that. Now imagine doing that for a week. "

    I IMAJIND I ARE AM JEST BYE A HOARSE!!1 :p

    -NUNYA

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