Sessions 14 and 15: The Star Quest
Continuing my format experimentation, this time around I decided to test a hexcrawl in Hearts Aglow. However, as it happens, I also adopted John R.A.'s hex paths, so from my players' perpsective it was still sorta dungeony. Especially because it was a part of the country they were exploring that is very clearly supernatural, the Mythical High Mountains With Evil Things, which in this setting is manifested physically and called "The Jungle" (in the sense of wilderness, not tropical rainforest).
They needed a new heart for a PC so they quested after a fallen star and got it. On the way they met shapeshifting sorcerers, elfs (both man-sized and tiny ones mounting dragonflies and wasps), and a giant bronze skeleton. Overall, pretty good stuff.
My experiment was to see how empty I could make a hexcrawl and still be fun, so I went with half. There were 29 keyed locations with 10 encounters happening around 25% of the time, and only 13 of them had anything going on whatsoever (and at least 4 of them were puzzles which weren't immediately obvious).
My conclusion was: it went perfectly fine, but as a point of preference I think it was a bit too desolate. I think it worked mostly because they had some guidance, they were specifically looking for something in this area, but it did drive home how thoroughly wild this area is. There was no civilisation, travel was measured in days, and whenever they lost some equipment I saw them wince, which is pretty cool. It accomplishes what I had hoped to convey with the Jungle.
That said, I prefer it when there are things to negotiate and stuff, so in the future I will use this kind of thing sparingly. Still, I think if anyone wants to sell that a region is wild and desolate and have players spend food and time getting somewhere, "make most of it empty" is a pretty valid way. That "points of light" design which I hear about.
The other thing I tried was some freeform improvising. On the second session (from today), the excellent Weird Writer joined the group and I decided I didn't want to run a standard Pendragon combat, so instead I just established what the risk was, asked how the player approached it, and they could either address it in a plausible way, compromise, or try to avoid it entirely, in which case we rolled 2d6 and the higher number got their view of the world, a la Primeval 2d6.
It went well! Last time I did this I kept trying to figure out what the monster was compromising and stuff, this time around it flowed much more (and my players, used to my shenanigans, just rolled with it). I think the only issue was that we hadn't made quite clear how much punishment a Mobile Suit can take, so a player taking a kick to the hip from a bronze giant made us go "uhh what would that do to a mobile suit?" so in the future, I think it's good to decide roughly how many telling blows a Mobile Suit can power through.
Aside from that, just like last time, the fight became a desperate scramble for their life, with two players grappling on the ground with the giant skeleton, which I always consider a plus.
Thinking of the future, I think we just need clearer objectives and goals right now. As it stands, I have two players who have pretty much wrapped up their short term goals, and WW's character is a bit fresh to have one, so I need to get them to figure out what is motivating them and what are they trying to accomplish on the long term, so that I can put complications on their way and derive adventures from it.
