Mapping to See What Happens - A Savage Worlds Sandbox Hexcrawl

Greetings! It’s been a while since I endeavored to try out Ben Wray's Dungeon World hexcrawl idea, but I did say I would report on my findings, so here it is.

For those of you who are into the whole brevity thing, here’s the summary: Use the Dungeon World steading system to create a deck of steading cards and deal them randomly onto a grid map. It’s a fun and easy way to make a living world with a crapload of adventure ideas. Give it a try.

Ben's original idea

As promised, I gave Ben’s idea a whirl, with a few twists. Since I would be making this map during the second gaming session, there were a few steadings (steadings are what Dungeon World calls any civilized place where you're relatively safe from monsters) already established and would be non-random. Also, rather than create a map for a Dungeon World game, I used this system to create a map for a Savage Worlds game of a most unusual nature. I think you’ll find, as I did, that the steading system is game-agnostic enough for this purpose.

                                                     
        

First I made a spreadsheet with 24 steadings - six villages, six towns, six keeps, and six cities. Then I randomly assigned each steading an advantage and a problem, then statted them out according to the rules. I removed one town, one keep, and one city (the ones I thought were least interesting). I did this because there seems to be a resource flow schema to the steading system. Villages have resources; towns buy those resources and sell them to villages, other towns, and cities. I discarded one of each steading that wasn't a village to keep the amount of resources on the map high and the size of the steadings low. This made a setting like the Wild West, with lots of opportunities to grow and exploit resources, but also great wilderness and low population.

Overview of all the steadings I generated - this alone is very helpful

Once I had a list of steadings I made a list of steading names, some taken from the Dungeon World book, some made up. Some of the best ones I got by browsing through the Google maps of the United States and looking for unusual town names  -  I've always loved the sound of Texarkana. Then I tried to get a feel for each steading and match the name to the feel. I've got a village on a major trade route? Let's call it Wetherford, for the river it crosses over. A town at a major crossroad with a bustling market got the name Junction, for where the roads meet. The large and wealthy city that traded with every steading nearby was named Central, not to indicate its position on the map, but rather it's self-perception as the hub and focus of all commerce.


After every steading had its stats, tags, and an evocative name, it started to look really exciting. Just the list alone started to inspire ideas, NPCs, events, etc. The final components needed were the six cursed places, which were renamed to fit the post-apocalyptic/trans-dimensional setting. I cut some index cards in half, wrote the name of each steading and cursed place on a card, added eight blank cards to complete the 32 card set for a 6x6 grid, and thus armed, went to the second gaming session to create the map with my players. 

Since this was the second gaming session, and we had described one village called Tallpines and a city called Dodge, I picked a village and a city that looked like they could be Tallpines (plagued by monsters? Why yes, that sounds like it’s next to a cursed, misty city ruin) and Dodge (militarized and overcrowded? definitely). I thew down these right in the center of the board. I chose the center because I believe the PCs should usually start in the center of the map - what's the point of building a map if they can travel a few hours and walk off the edge of it? I shuffled the index cards and dealt them out onto the cardboard, from left to right, and from top to bottom and here's what I got:

At first it was a little daunting, as things didn’t match up the way I imagined they would, but that’s the point of randomizing, isn’t it? To see what happens, to not know, to have to deal with the unexpected. I entered the results into a Google Sheet for safekeeping, and I have been studying it ever since, enjoying the questions it creates. Why is this steading like this? How can it be that way, despite its position on the map? The answers to these questions are always fun.

Each square is approximately 24 miles, or one days travel on foot, requiring one ration.

I love having this map out on the table while we play. It lets the players see where the steadings are and read their evocative names, inspiring their vision of the setting, but it also conceals all the cool secrets that I know about those steadings. It’s inspirational to the GM and the players, and helps to build both a living world that everyone is helping to create, but also a mysterious world with some interesting and dangerous secrets for the players to discover.


The whole experience is very reminiscent of my days playing Fallout 2, travelling the vast grid between Vault City and the NCR, and seeing what happens on the way. Needless to say, this creates tremendous feels of a positive nature. Next time, I'll talk more about why that's a great thing, and why I'd like to see more Fallout 2 style games on both the table and the screen.

As we play, the players discover all the shit that I’ve planned, and I discover how they react to that shit. They spit out ideas and I jot them down. I save them like precious metal ingots to be later forged into adventurous ideas. It’s glorious.

Next I’m gonna get into the wonderful weird world of planning and playing a game about rifts that’s nothing like the game Rifts.


Here's a link to the Google Sheet with all the mentioned documents.


Cheers! Thanks for reading. What do you think? Add your voice, friend!