Blighted Bastiards or abstract mapping and supplies for Ito and Electric Bastionland
In my last post I've talked about Chris McDowalls' Blighters and what I liked about it. One thing I really liked was the preparation template for missions. Simple, quick and done on half a page.
I often have problems with preparing big locations like dungeons or Bastions' boroughs, because my cerebral ganglion can't keep up the concentration. The first few minutes are always a rush of motivation, but then I realize how much is still left to do and often just postpone the project till whenever. I need to break things up in small steps to trick my self in constantly receiving the feeling of having accomplished something.
Modularity is a key to human creativity.
Therefore I wanted to see if I could use Blighters approach to prep for Into the Odd.
Let's see how that might work!
(Spoiler: It worked)
(Spoiler 2: In retrospective it is a bit of a rip-off on Trophy Golds' set and travelling rules. Or at least I think so. I haven't played Trophy yet. Maybe you should play it and compare the two approaches.)
So how does this go?
1. Modules:
A module is created with the following template (basically Blighters location templates).
Location name
- Room or descriptor
- Room or descriptor
- Room or descriptor Elements
- Hazards, Oddities, Treasure
- Hazards, Oddities, Treasure
- Hazards, Oddities, Treasure
When you prepare the stuff, always prepare at least one location at a time. Keep every location you prepared, even if you think it doesn't fit the overall feeling of your expedition site.
When you want to start an expedition grab as many modules/locations as you like. You can either decide which modules can be reached from another beforehand or you make this decission on the go.
2. Supplies and traveling:
The supplies of the crew will be represented through a supply gauge. A d6 that starts at 1 and will eventually tick up if certain decissions are made or consequences are suffered. The number of the gauge reads as follows:
1-3: You have plenty supplies: On a short rest everyone of you restores their
HP.
4-5: Running low: On a short rest all but one of you can restore their HP
6: Starving: You are all DEPRIVED and can't restore your HP.
The supply gauge is restored (set back to 1) if you find a new source of food/drink.
Traveling from one module to another takes by default the entire morning/ midday/ evening or night. Some factors (e.g. tricky terrain, hard weather or a very long distance) may raise the amount of time needed to get to your destination. Also keep in mind that everyone who goes an entire day (four time phases) without sleeping is DEPRIVED until they catch some sleep.
Everytime you move from one module to another the conductor rolls for a random encounter (like in normal ItO or EB):
1: Encounter is right there
2: Signs of the encounter nearby
3-6: Everythings clear
While traveling you can tick the supply gauge to:
- Reduce the amount of time needed (e.g. You would need the morning and midday to get to a location. Tick 1 supply and you only need the morning. Tick 2 supply and you already arrive there in the morning)
- Ignore a random encounter as you take a longer route to bypass it.
And that's pretty much it.
Of course you can fuck around with this formula as much as you like. You could build a "classic" dungeon step by step with the modules. Just take some modules and decide which rooms connect to another module. You could use the module templates as the landmarks in Electric Bastionlands' mapping system. In that case I'd say that you also write a module template for each of the traveling lines (just replace the rooms with descriptors). In fact this is basically the same way the example expedition sites in the oddendum are presented. The only thing new, would be the three elements per module.
Ha, I've fooled you! Nothing new to find on this blog, only old stuff rearanged and badly glued together with spider silk.
That's it for now.