Idraluna Archives

The Great Antarctic Hexcrawl pt. 7d - St. Weirlund's Folly

This is my own version of lore24, an admittedly over-ambitious attempt to procedurally generate a 43,000-hex crawl for my homebrewed far-future Antarctica, Antibor. Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 and 4b, Part 5, Part 6 and 6b, Part 7, 7b, 7c.

Weirlund's Folly

In Part 7 I wrote about generating a key for a 330-hex prefecture called "St. Weirlund's Folly". Toward the end I listed some shortcomings of the raw content the generators produced. While I work on improving the code, I'm committed to treating the Weirlund's Folly test result as canonical & have been slowly embellishing it. The goal is to eventually get it in a state where I'm an hour or two of prep away from being ready to adventure. The current state of the key (plus some other stuff I generated) can be viewed here.

It certainly isn't 'done', but I've added enough to get a better sense of what kind of polish subsequent prefectures will need.

Changes

The Encounter Table

Encounter tables have been a bit of a hangup throughout this whole process -- I keep wanting to implement some abstruse system where I use a script to compile a list of all lairs and then weight encounter likelihoods by the monster's range and extraversion. But the fact that I haven't done so yet indicates that the juice ain't worth the squeeze. Right now, my 'fuck it & roll some dice' system looks like this:

When an encounter is rolled, roll a d12.

The default Wandering Table works like this:

Roll with advantage on roads and near cities, and with disadvantage in wilds. Entries can be reused or replaced as needed.

Anyways, here's the table I put together for Weirlund's Folly:

Rumors & Lore

My goal is to write 6-12 rumors when generating a new prefecture, though that's probably a tall order.

  1. The Warlord Darlag the Defiler disappeared with his plundered treasure after landsquenets raided his camp near the river Aleph. He was last seen fleeing Psouth into the mountains.
  2. Weirlund's Folly is known for intense storms -- Urdukites often initiate their fulgurarchs here.
  3. A drunken old ex-worminger named Melrose Lurch pushes a gondola in Jouissance and will tell passengers about how his extremely valuable first-edition copy of Master Drofo's Aphorisms was stolen by pirates operating from the Psouthern mountains.
  4. The castle of the Cyberian tyrant Murdicog is somewhere in the mountains of the Psouth.
  5. There are valuable blimminth-fruit growing between Dumah peak and Ft. Wurlitzer.
  6. Ft. Wurlitzer is named for the large and prominent Wurlitzer family. The Wurlitzers co-founded the Philosopher's guild in Jouissance.

Choosing to Ignore

Player-Facing Map

Just for fun I drew & watercolored a player-facing map that gives the approximate layout of the area. It's not meant to be strictly accurate - if anything, misleading is better as it encourages players to draw their own.

I decided to name the rivers 'Aleph', 'Flea', and 'Morgenstern', and the bay is the 'Bay of Ambivalence'. Since scanning, I have also added labels for Dumah Peak, Propinquity Pt., the city of Squamous Demise, and The Antechamber.

Volumes of The Key

When I compile St. Weirlund's Folly + Murdicog's Manse to an 8.5" by 11" document with narrow margins, the result takes up 16 pages. I'm guessing that future prefectures will grow as I continue to improve on my generators, so if we say prefectures will average around 20 pages, I'm looking at around 2400 pages. -- not as terrible as I was anticipating, tbh. But to have pdfs that load in reasonable time & the possibility of printing, I split the key into 11 volumes based on which Archon holds supreme authority over the territory.

I just manually assigned these based on some vague ideas about the lore (for example, Ramiel is a reclusive mathematician Archon, so it only rules the three prefectures around The Concavity, and Sabaoth protects the lands outside the prefecture system). St. Weirlund's Folly falls in the domain of Erebus (red).

In order to restrict the rate at which players wander between domains,3 I'm tempted to place some kind of wall along their borders, traversable only at road/rail/river crossings, breakages, or by air. (I'm envisioning something like the wall of Nessus in Book of The New Sun or Morrowind's Ghostfence).

You can view the WIP Erebus key containing Wierlund's Folly and its Knorthwestern neighbor Squamous Demise here.

The Future

Having successfully run and embellished 1/105th of the map, I'm going to broaden my focus again. A lot of what still needs to happen is just the quotidian labor of making my random generators better, but here are a few things I hope to make posts about in the coming months:

  1. I strongly prefer to GM as impartially as possible, but I like the idea of occasionally getting to↩

  2. I intend to cook up a script to generate random weirdos & their entourages and make a list of 100 to slowly mark off↩

  3. (So that I can print & prep one domain at a time).↩

#DIY #GIS #antibor #lore24