Solo-RP
All things solo-role-playing
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The Annals of Glen Forkovian
The Annals of Glen Forkovian
All things solo-role-playing
For the sake of simplicity, let's assume that unless otherwise stated, travel occurs during daylight conditions, and that a single 2-mile hex is traversed hourly. Let's further assume that a character can cover six of these hexes daily — and that this incorporates rest stops, brief hunting for game, time for meals, time for backtracking. That's 12 miles per day with no ticks against Body stress track, so long as weather conditions aren't extreme, there is adequate food and water, and that after such a day's travel you're getting 6+ hours of rest, if not sound sleep.
The above assumptions are for the usual travel circumstances, business as usual. This doesn't preclude the possibility of traveling under cover of complete darkness — although night-time travel in the Endless Rime campaign is usually avoided simply because of plummeting temperatures making it very uncomfortable and hazardous.
Given our "most of the time" travel assumptions outlined in the first paragraph, let's stipulate that daily travel (could be done nightly instead) — minus breaks, hunting, meals — amounts to six hours and covers 12 miles if the terrain isn't difficult. For the sake of game mechanics, we'll break a day's travel into three 2-hour phases: Morning, Midday, Afternoon legs of travel. Under optimal conditions, our PC will travel 4 miles in each of those phases.
There will be some long-time hex crawlers who read this and will argue that a PC can cover 18-24 miles in a day. I will simply say that terrain in 35th millennium B.C. will be assumed to have been extremely rugged, and that this (as well as breaks, hunting, combat, backtrack/re-routing delays, etc.) account for the slower travel.
With regard to the Endless Rime campaign, set in the Upper Neolithic 35,000 years ago, all overland travel counts as hex-crawling, since there are no roads or large man-made landmarks by which to navigate. However, in a later post I will incorporate a mechanic to take into account whether or not a PC has traveled a given hex multiple times and may have developed some internal map of the area and thus have the benefit of familiarity.
Our loop for each of these phases of daily travel (Morning, Mid-Day, Afternoon):
The typical procedure for travel is as follows: 1. The GM declares the terrain type and current travel round. 2. Each player declares an activity. 3. The GM rolls for random encounters according to the danger level. 4. Each Activity and random encounter is resolved in a logical order determined by the GM. Typically, player character activities are resolved first. 5. Changes in location, terrain, time of day, character condition etc, are noted. 6. Back to 1
Check for Random Encounters twice in each of the three phases of daily travel.
Endless Rime Deaths & Kills
Stenn Bearclaws is a Cro-Magnon man. He is the hero and protagonist in a solo-roleplay campaign entitled Endless Rime. The setting is an area of future France that would someday be known as the Dordogne. Stenn's clan is the Moose Rock Clan. Stenn and his clan have increasingly been tormented of late by bujant, spirit-possessed wild animals or monsters. It now appears that these bujant may to some degree be cooperating with and subservient to the Void Lord, a great spirit of malignancy that dwells beyond the skies. Stenn and his clan have just weathered a supernatural even known as the Red Snow - in which local temperatures fall to far below freezing and a reddish snow falls like frozen flakes of blood upon the Land. Stenn's mother Norda and eight other clan members at Moose Rock have succumbed overnight to the cold and the spiritual malaise, and have experienced The Reddening, first as their bodies became torpid preceding death, then as their bodies broke down into a rusty particulate that the clan call 'The Sands of the Departed'. Stenn's father, Chief Hrowaka, has revealed that he is not truly Stenn's father. The chief is giving Stenn a quest to find some way to fight the Void Lord and save the clan from his increasing depredations.
I could incorporate the Twist Dice from Loner into my Endless Rime campaign. Since I'm always rolling multiple d6 as dice pools, a side effect of those rolls would be that they'd occasionally produce one or more pairs of doubles, incrementing the Twist counter. When the Twist Counter gets to 3, roll 2d6 Twist Dice and reset the Twist Counter to zero.
