(A) Exploration in Pointcrawl – places and paths
This is archival material from previous blog
Pointcrawl comes with two elements – points and lines. These can be another things, like circles and fields and arrows and dotted lines meaning different things. Point is (pun intended) they represent places (or events) and paths to them – restricting or informing about known ways to get somewhere and cutting out the unnecessary parts like few empty hexes. Or when you go around the city from one location to the next without describing each street and corner. But it’s not conscious pointcrawl, it’s just a simple abstraction from which we construct the one, the -crawl we’re going to talk about.
As opposed to hexcrawl or gridcrawl the most characteristic thing in pointcrawl is uncertainty. You do not have written, drawn or described surroundings. There is no hex which would tell you if there is forest/desert/waterbed. It is kind of like on real life – if you walk through the road in the forest you know as much as the most distant tree you can see. What’s in the forest? What is behind the forest? You don’t know until you go there. Even Game Master doesn’t know how much “hexes” or “grid” this forest takes. But may know how long it takes to traverse it or how many events happen inside. Knows the instruction to go through it as it is known by locals. If you go into the forest it may become a single point or a few of them, or even uneventful path between two places. The procedure you’re using or props like map or clues and characteristic locations can inform some of it first. Even in our modern times I didn’t know there was a pond a few hundred meters away from my house. I bumped into it years after moving here when I was walking my dog and I have waaaay better access to such information than people had in historic times.
What exactly is “exploration”? I think people in this term include at least two meanings. First one is about discovery, interacting with whole narrative setting, creatures and objects, usually in order to know more about another element of it – speaking with villagers in a region to get information about some mysterious ruins, weapon, jewel, whatever. Exploration is interaction, interaction with something you know, you are looking for, something foreshadowed during adventure or in the distance. It’s hard to accomplish the sense of exploration and wonder and difficult for me to advise anyone on such topic. I can only say that pointcrawl allows you to map locations, people, events and maybe this way you can bring these mysteries to life and reward players interest. I believe no amount of “-crawl” procedures can help you better do it, especially if they are making things random.
But there is other, second meaning of exploration. The one people give more duck about because it’s simpler to define and play. The Wilderness Wandering. It happens for few reasons, and I think they are important, even if not connected to pointcrawl way of life. Why do we wander through wilderness? And why is it rarely compelling, explorative, interesting part of the adventure? Because it needs a certain place and goal. In real life there is rarely empty space in places of interest – civilization does not like empty space. Or trees, considering how many of them is cut in my area.
So most places do have roads and mapped or at least well known places. Like, each farmer knows where theirs lands are. Each lord knows here are their villages and forests, mountains and stuff. When people live nearby, especially if plenty of people live in small area then the land tend to be known without blank spots. Especially if it is a town, because small villages and other societies can live without leaving that much impact on wilderness around them. So when you actually travel unmapped, roadless wilderness you probably have a vague goal in mind. It’s too dangerous, too uncertain and resource-costly you won’t to that just for funsies. Finding good place to build a stronghold. Finding lost temple of your goddess or memento of your lost tribe. Searching for the great beast or tribe of local merfolk warriors. [I must write these ideas somewhere and make adventures out of them]. So you either look for traces of someone/something, specific place or conditions. Or going in specific direction to get to some place – mapping a new road or just taking one-time detour – it’s a particular case if you choose to take supposedly “shorter” way through this roadless wilderness instead of longer, roundabout yet mapped road.
How can we pointcrawl this? First let’s cut it into chunks and possibilities. We’re going to take something of a random events tables as an inspiration. Let’s say it takes 12 days to traverse civilized road and 5 to go through hostile turf of whatever. Do our heroes have access to any guide? Guide also can be treated as a fast travel method – just prepare some places, events, random encounter tables. But without anyone? Lets wander!
What are the stakes? Enemy forces pursuing the team? Ritual sacrifice happening in short amount of time? Depleting resources in desolate lands? Some very important NPC slowly dying from a curse? Hard to make exciting wandering when you have all the time and resources in the world. So assuming we do not have a guide, we’re in a hurry and chose to go dangerous road – how do we do that?
We can divide the travel through wilderness by days, because it is something we know. We established travel through inhabited lands takes 12 days and 5 through wilds. So we divide this travel in 5 chunks. What else is important in wandering? Decisions. In each chunk players will have to make a decision regarding travel. Maybe they can go shorter way, through hostile territory. Or longer, more calm, but wasting time. Or sometimes the short way means traveling through river (and rivers in wilderness are hard to pass). Or wading through a mudslide. Team should be able to spend some time/resources to make informed decision. You can waste few hours so someone scouts the way up to check what happening there.
And I’m going through this article, writing these things down and think to myself – it’s not a matter of just a pointcrawl. You can effectively make it out of a hexcrawl, pathcrawl or whatever crawl you want. These are not pointcrawl rules and advice. The case is – pointcrawl is not that different than any other way. You just abstract unnecessary elements and map places in a clear way. So I’m thinking I will just show you in the future some of my pointcrawl attempts.