Clouder

Clouder's Travel Rules (PDF)

Several blogs written by much more clever people than myself went up over the past few weeks (links after the break), talking about "hex crawl" gameplay. Hex crawling is a mode of Dungeons & Dragons play that has its roots in other, older games and which gets carried forward into modern D&D as a vestige - an idol of the past to be acknowledged but not utilized particularly well. The gist is players are given a map broken out into hexes. They decide how far they want to move in a day, pick a destination within that, and move to the hex the destination is in and hope to find adventure along the way. If you ever delighted in getting lost on the overworld map of a video game, poking into nooks and crannies, the hex crawl conceptually is meant to recreate that feeling.

Building off some prior work for an aborted 5e D&D campaign, I created travel mechanics for my Beyond the Wall game with the help of one of the players in the game. I told myself to try and use this space to share some of the work I've done and this seems like a good time to do so.

Hopefully those of y'all looking to spring board your own travel rules in your own tabletop games can find something useful in here!

Starting to regret adding crafting to my game and putting the work in to make it exciting and engaging for my players as I write-up a my umpteenth item description for a crafting material. Real hoisted by my own petard vibe here.

Thanks to being sick, I had more time than expected to read through the new Spelljammer set for D&D. I'm slowly working elements of 2e Spelljammer into my Beyond the Wall game, so between what seemed like some positive changes in WotC over the past couple years and just being curious, I grabbed the set. I'll put some longer thoughts below the break, but tl;dr:

It's fine - the art's pretty and I'll use some creatures and NPCs from it, but it still has frustrations endemic to all WotC published 5e books and lacks an identity beyond the broader 5e identity of 'forbidding whimsy.'

I'm working on maps for my Beyond the Wall campaign today and just want to share 'Dungeon Scrawl,' by probabletrain on itch.io. It hits the right amount of tools and polish I need in a map tool without overwhelming me with options, works in browser, let's you save your layers, and imports into VTTs like Roll20 with ease. I still have to do small edits in an image editor tool after (usually erasing walls between rooms), but it's been so much easier to use than trying to do this in GIMP. Highly recommend!