THE HEXCRAWL HACK: Project Introduction

THE HEXCRAWL HACK

A cheapstake take on Hexcrawls based on my favourite system

 

An Introduction

Hi eveyone! First and foremost I apologise for my bad english. Sadly, I'm not an english native speaker and I live in a country where English teaching is... disappointing, at best.
Secondly, my name is Matteo (he/him), you can call me whatever, and this is kind of my development log for a hack based on The Black Hack by David Black, enhacing the wilderness adventure part of the book, to develop a NSR system that can be used to play a West Marches type of campaign.
I explain what is a West Marches game and why I made the choices I made.

The Project

What is a West Marches game?

A West Marches Campaign is a style of TTRPG sandbox theorised from Ben Robbins in 2007. The pillars of this style of play are:
- The Tavern: There is a neutral place where adventurers meet. All of them, this is pretty crucial. This serves as the departure and arrival of all of the adventures. Everyone talks with everyone, just like a real fictional taver;
- No Fixed Schedule: there is no weekly appointment or stuff. Players plan future adventures in the tavern, decide when they are departing and make contact with the GM. When all of the players agree on a date, the adventure is scheduled.
- Sandbox Play: The adventure through the wildlands is the point. Every adventurer wants to adventure in the wildlands to get or collect something. 
- Encounter are not balanced: since you can go wherever you want, you can get to the wrong place and die. Or maybe you stepped on a wandering dragon tail or something.
- You are the first: No NPC in the wildlands. Or else, not that the wildlands lack intelligent lifeforms. Just they are not NPCs

What system fits the best?

While Ben Robbins used D&D3.0 back in the days, I find that NSR games fits the best with the supposed high lethality of the campaign. While I, as a future GM, want to make it clear that running away IS an option, the chance of things going really south and dying is pretty... concrete. Essentially of the NSR movement implement very fast character creation, so there it is. Even if your character dies you can be on your feet again in ten minutes or so. 
Then, since I, like all of us, have a job and a family, and chores and other boring stuff, I wanted a system that can be fairly easy to adapt to material I eventually find online and that provides both solid and fast tools for improvisation.
My choice fell upon Into the Odd and The Black Hack.
The Black Hack has really gamified rules for tracking resources, rules for adventuring without a lightsources and (which I think is awesome giving all the tavern thingy) experience system tied to revelry at a tavern. It has a simplified mode for designing monsters (basically you decide how many hit dice they have and the rest is procedural). On the other hand the time tracking system of TBH may be too vague, and there are too little tools for gamified travel which is a pillar of a West Marches campaign.
Into the Odd has an awesome classless character making, rules so easy you can master them in half an hour and beautiful tools to make up an adventure on the fly.

What System am I using?

My choice fall on The Black Hack. Not only for the reasons I stated above, but because here in Italy there's an italian translation under developent by MSEdizioni, which will be available one day and they're so awesome they've made a italian Quickstart available in their site. This grants me both a comfortable way to play the game and a equally comfortable piece to hand to the new players.


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