Topics
Landmarks, Clues, and Secrets
We discuss finding hidden things using landmarks and clues, and suggest that important and interesting things in hexes may not necessarily be animal lairs, but could be secret areas like cave connections to the Underdark or dungeon sites.
Tools
Tools should help optimize your play style. Prep as much as needed to get to the desired level of creativity while playing, without over-preparing.
Naming Places
Giving names to locations helps give players context and guides their decisions in a sandbox-style game.
Keying Hexes
Plan ahead for keying hexes and prioritize based on potential time and reward. Consider using dice to determine details and value of named locations to determine necessity of additional planning.
Thinking about Streaming a Live Play
The goal is to show the game as a reasonable facsimile of real D&D, not just a show with a hidden game. Be consistent with streaming and recruit moderators to monitor the chat.
Transcript
Note: This is an unedited AI-powered transcription so it will be full of errors and misunderstandings. I may come back to clean it up, or not, but here it is, warts and all.
Um all right, good evening. I'm in the country. You can tell because I've got a backdrop that's not a green wall. Hopefully you can I think you can see me. Hopefully you can hear me. All right, according to all my meters, I should be hey, Jason. Should be audible. But you never know.
Since I have different setups depending on where I am, there's always a chance that I messed up in the calibration. This is my monthly. I think I might do these more often, but at the moment this is my monthly. I call it heck crawling 101. AMA so I've got some stuff here on the big board on Ouija that I'm kind of messing around with. And in between, just talking about that, just kind of working on it. I'm really here for you, your questions, your answers, your comments. Doesn't have to be a question, it could be a comment.
Anything to discuss. It doesn't even have to be. I mean, I like if we could focus for the most part on hex crawling stuff, but I'm happy to go abroad of the topic, if you will, if there's something fruitful. Everyone had an awesome weekend. I'm working on let's see, what am I working on here? So the populating of hexes stick, right? You got hexes potentially have a bunch of Hexes need to populate them. So what procedures to populate them now I like though, it's work. The concept of the landmark clues in the secret and the landmark being something obvious, clues being not quite so obvious, but as their name suggests, they lead somewhere. They can be things up and of they can be things in and of themselves.
But there are also these things that you can find to lead you towards something that is hidden. Secret. Different people use different terms for it. If you watched the stream on Friday, there was someone asking about this specifically about how do you find stuff in hexes or how do you determine that? So I like the idea of having the landmark, the obvious thing or somewhat obvious thing. Clues not obvious things, but the clues help sort of point you down the road towards that secret thing, which could be an important layer, maybe not an animal layer. So I don't think that necessarily the secret of a hex would be there's a bear cave, unless it's a super secret bear. But even I think an owl bear cave probably wouldn't be as a real secret, but something that's kind of the sort of secret, I don't know, important in quotes or sort of interesting thing. Probably an owl bear cave probably wouldn't qualify as, OOH, this is the really interesting thing, but maybe a cave that connects to the underdark or obviously dungeon sites would probably qualify as secrets.
I have just magic sites. So what I'm doing with you can see here I have a bunch of stuff on the board and I'll sort of talk it through DND, of course, but I'm here for you, so feel free to interrupt me with your questions. I don't need to blather on, but essentially hey, Magnus. Essentially looking at, okay, what kind of landmarks do we have? And this is what I have, all these lists, so if you look at the board, I'm just kind of banding about some stuff. So my generic procedure for the moment is you go scouting. Go scouting for a watch. You spend a watch. Right now I have is 3 hours, but three 4 hours that people use different things doesn't really matter too much what the segment of time is, and just super generically.
So I'm not worrying about terrain modifying this stuff yet. That's something that probably will come later. Probably won't get into it tonight, but we'll just start off in a generic, hey, I'm spending a watch, scouting, and then roll. Riley that's what the intro is upon. Yes, the intro the steam steamboat is the stream steamboat. Thing is yes, it's definitely you caught me, Ryland. Yes. That is absolutely a pun.
Hey, I'm trying some new tea tonight. Not sure how I feel about it, but it's interesting. Anyone play anything new lately? Well, I had my home game on Friday, but then I got the board game Earth, and I did a solo play of Earth. It's a really interesting game. I think if you're someone who likes, let's see, Terraforming, Mars, and Wingspan and those sorts of games, I think Earth fits in a really nice place. I'm excited to play more of it, but I don't have it here with me, so it does have a solo mode, and I played a solo game hoping to get the wife and maybe some other folks to play with me back at home. So my generic procedure magnus says they had their oh, nice session. Zero worlds without number.
Awesome. So the procedure here you declare you're going to spend this watch, your wilderness turn, if you will. Right. Watch. Going to go search or scout. I think of scouting, reconnaissance, maybe recon, maybe would be the word. I've been going back and forth on this a lot in terms of how I want this procedure to work and what I'm thinking right now. My feeling as of today, which could change within five minutes, is that I don't want there to be a chance of failure.
If you spend your watch scouting, you may find a single thing, you may find multiple things depending on a roll of the dice, but you're not going to find nothing. You will be rewarded with something for taking this time to scout. So I just wrote up a simple procedure. If you roll a one and three, you're going to get a single location. If you roll a four OSR Five or the DM rolls, you get two locations, and if you roll six, you get three locations. But you have to go in order. So if this is a new Hex, you haven't been in here before, and you decide, I'm going to go scout OSR, recon reconnoiter, whatever you want to call it. You'd roll a D six if there were five things, one landmark, three clues, and the secret, and you get three locations.
You would get the landmark first, and then you get two of the clues, and then the last clue in the secret, you'd have to scout again, and it would be cumulative. So once those are off the board, and then you rolled two successes, you would get the final, and you'd get the secret, if that makes sense. Magnus, you're nervous about your game. I hear you. It's always nerve wracking. Is this a Randos game? Are you recruiting online? Is this an in person game with folks? You know, I really love this stuff in worlds of that number. But it's funny, I went through, gosh, I don't know how long ago it was now. Maybe I want to say a year, but maybe it's not that long.
I did a series of streams on a bunch of the tables and kind of the DM tools, but I never actually read through the mechanical rules of worlds of that number. So I really appreciate the table stuff, but I feel like I need to go back and actually read through the mechanical stuff of how the actual system works. If you're playing the system. Hey, no, sorry. So that's my general procedure. And then I should say this should be really one location roll per watch. Those are my very generic situation. Enter a new hex, and granted, the party doesn't really know whether new hex, but they're entering a new area.
They want to scout it off. That's how I would roll the dice and then figure out what they've seen. I feel like that's good, because I envision scouting or reconnaissance. It's not something you're doing as you move. It is you are legit, which I kind of feel like is mostly how it's done. I feel like, I don't know, I read about, and this is not necessarily thematic to fantasy, medieval fantasy games, but when you generally send out a force to scout an area, you're not moving around while they're scouting, the whole point is you're going out, they're scouting, they're figuring out the lay of land. They're going to come back, tell you the lay of the land, and then you move through it. If you imagine actually, this is well, Lord of the Rings, Fellowship of the Ring, this is what they do.
They send the Sons of Elron when they're in Rivendell, the Sons of Elron go out and they scout a whole bunch of stuff. They get the lay of the land, they come back, and then the Fellowship, or Gandalf and Aragorn and maybe Elron huddle up with this information that comes back, and then they decide what to do. And that's how I envision scouting. This is not the oh, I'm 200 yards ahead of the party. This is like, no, we're at camp. So imagine you wake up in day one, right? You come into a place, you camp, you camp at night, you wake up and you decide, hey, okay, I want to scout it out at that time. The rest of the party, you're sitting at camp, and then whoever's going out to scout will scout, and then other folks can do other kind of downtime or sort of camp activities while they're wait. So this isn't something you're doing as you're moving, so you're investing this.
Say we're not going to move for these 3 hours, OSR whatever long you want to do, because we want to allow the scout, whoever that is, to go and scout and come back. One thing I've thought about, it's hard to do if I'm doing on a D Six because you just run out of Faces of the Dice, but whether you want to have really whether you want to have bad risks involved with scouting and again, it's something I go back and forth. It might be roll another DC, roll two D six, maybe on doubles or something, you get I don't know, I might have to mess around that because I kind of like the idea of keeping it on D Six is just in the classic hex crawl lying methods. But anyway, I'll just stick with this. Hey, Phil. What's up? Magnus says that it was my oh, my videos are actually what brought them. Oh, nice. Game system itself seems pretty straightforward, just new to hex crawls and anomalous GM.
Well, everyone's got to start somewhere. Magnus recom procedure. Yeah, the idea of Magnus is that you'll have a number of things well, I guess I'll just write it. So my concept actually, this is not the I'll use a different name. The concept that I'm working on is that you have let's call it wilderness actions. Right. Wilderness actions, okay. This is the concept sometimes.
Ouija, really? Okay. And then scouting is one, or we can call recon, and again, I'm going to put recon next to it. I don't know what's the better term, to be honest. I know they both work it's whether one gets the idea across that you're really looking for. I want that. I don't know if this is a word. encamping. Right.
That will be another one. Obviously, we're going to have moving would be a third one. Oh, Bonk said that they introduced their family to Morkborg. Oh, nice. Moving over to Karen or errant, hex crawl sandbox next. Oh, that's awesome. How did you like mork? Bourge, Bonk? How'd they take to it? I'm hoping to get my daughter Enthused, to play. I don't think my wife my hope would be, look, I'd love if my wife wanted to do it.
She's not super into it at the moment, but it's kind of the thing I imagine in my mind, maybe that if I can get my daughter into it, and my wife sees how we're having fun, assuming we're having fun, that maybe I could lure her in that way. Well, I'll take what I could get. So I imagine you have a number of so for however many watches in your day. You would pick one of these, and each one of these is kind of its own thing. You pick moving, you're going to move picking camping, and that's the act of finding and establishing your camp. And then you have this scouting recon, and I've played around with different systems where there's a lot of overlap between what these do. Potentially, I could see having a number of different things, so maybe really, in recon, you could have options. That one would be I don't know what to be searching, which would maybe lead into these procedures.
Another one could be wayfinding. Another one could be I don't know what would be for evasion, maybe something like that. Again, I'm all playing around. I'm just talking off the top of my head. So none of this stuff is final in any way. Bong says they're pretty new to tabletop RPG players, were their younger brothers parents. It was very straightforward, very little tripping of rules. Nice.
Cool. Yeah, more boars is a lot of fun. I know some folks have said, and I don't have any experience one way or another. I've only played a single one shot at a convention of MOOC Bourge that it's maybe not the best, or people don't find the best fit for campaign play, especially with that whole world that could end at any moment. Magnus wishes they could get their parents. Yeah, my parents are a little bit too old, I think, to be into it, but I'll be happy if I can get my daughter, and maybe a long term goal, my wife, to play. That's about as much as I could wish for at this point. In any case, however, we end up having this.
The scouting leads to this procedure here. I might have to amend it, and then, as I mentioned, DND again, please throw me your questions, folks. You don't have to just listen to me going on about this, though, of course, if you're interested in it. That's awesome. A number of landmarks. I just came up with four. I'm trying to come up with numbers that would work. As for dice rolling, so I'm looking at four 6810.
Twelve. So right now I have landmarks. I just have natural phenomena phenomenon. A boundary marker, a monument, or a structure. The structure would include ruins, so it could be a ruin. It could be something that's still standing, like a tower or a stronghold. I'm not sure what other options there might be. You could probably think of them, come up with some clue, just generically, some kind of path.
Could be an activity site. I was trying to think about what different sites, an activity site, could include a kill site, could include a site of some kind of conflict. Could be an old campsite, something of that nature. There's probably other ideas of what clues could be. I suppose there could be something like a I don't know, sometimes coming up with a very evidence I don't know, you find, oh, look, there's a Chester Copper Pots map, an item of some kind. Maybe a piece of evidence might make that more oops. And then again, secrets, ye old lairs, dungeons, blah, blah, blah. Blue, blue.
Nosorian says it was their older brothers who got them into Ad and D. We three were a very geeky bunch back in the day. That's cool. Yeah. My sister is younger than me. DND we had pretty different interests, still do. So we weren't gaming together. The age difference is a little bit much.
It would have been like, right when I was really leaving, would she have been at an age where I would have wanted or been interested in kind of engaging her in that way? And it didn't work, though. Her daughter her daughter is kind of interested in the playing. In fact, I'm going to get her a book. Look, I'm going to get her a fifth edition because it's her birthday this summer, so it won't be in time for 1D DND. D I'm getting her a fifth edition. One of the starter sets. I'm not going to try to they live far from me, so it's not like I'm going to be seeing her. So it would be great to say, oh, here's old school essentials or something.
But I want her to be able to experience it with her friends and other people who are into gaming right now. The vast majority of them by default, are five E players. So I'm not going to give her a game system that when she takes it somewhere to play as kids come to play, like they don't get it. It'd be one thing if she was nearby and I could play with her, then I would totally get her something like Shadow Dark if we were out or old school essentials or something like that. But given they're far and I want her to get something that she could find, a reasonable ability of not seeming like some kind of I don't know what it would be for kids. Like, oh, my uncle got me this says Basic DND or whatever it says, this thing DND. Nobody knows what it is, but it's nice. It's more like planting the seed.
Yeah, no, sorry, exactly. I'll plant the seed and then when we play, she can play her fifth edition. And then when we play, I'll say, oh, let me tell you about the days of high adventure and we can get into BX or something like that and see if that stirs anything within her soul. Something else I like, I like thinking about the alignment of the place. This may not apply to a single Hex. The way I envision this is you have regions of areas, you think of merckwood. I don't know in Hexes how big merckwood is, but if it's three Hexes, I don't think each one of those if you have three Hexes of woods that are like the Grim Wood, I don't expect you to come up with this for each one. But I do think it's nice to think about, okay, well, this is a chaos.
This sort of aligned us places chaos meaning in the same way that we think of the classic dungeon as underworld, that it's sort of anti people right. That you're encroaching. When the adventurers are land in this particular Hex, the land is kind of against them. That would be chaos and law. A lawful Hex might be one that is protected and the one like the unicorn is still there, or ants or dryads or someone who still cares for it is still flourishing. And maybe there's a healing pool there. It's a nice place. And then there are other places where, like, merckwood, like these kind of dark woods, OSR, horrible swamps, and just by giving it maybe, I think maybe, I think no, I think that maybe if you go through the process and actually give it an alignment, then you will feel free to act and say, you know what? This place is anti adventurers, so it is going to act in a way that seems to be trying to mess them up.
DND it's not me. I rolled forward or I determined through, Lord, this place is evil and it's going to act in an evil way, and I'm okay with that. I can make my peace with it. And then the players can discover the players could see, like detect evil all around you. Magnus asks, do I have any favorite systems or tables for generating Hex features on the fly? Their understanding is that not every Hex is key going to a game, but I've always been confused on that. Well, I think to the extent that you can key all your Hexes, I think it's good. But this is one reason. So I don't have a particular set of tables.
I'm kind of hoping to come out of this what I've got here on the screen at some stage, potentially as a set of tables. There's things like the Tome of Adventure design that I used in my game on Friday and kind of came up with an interesting location. There's worlds Without Number has stuff in it. There's a lot. There's the D 30 Sandbox Companion. Magnus if you go through my playlist, like on Hex crawling, you'll see references somewhere. I do some kind of reads of them. I think the important thing is not to go overboard with how many Hexes you're putting on the page.
And I think what happens is and I have a picture of it and this is what I love about this kind of whiteboard thing is, look at that. I can zoom way out and I can come over here. So this map I picked up some time ago from Reddit and I've used it a lot. Not mine, I didn't create. This is somebody's game, and it's fine. But the problem that you might see or that's not even a problem, it really depends on your philosophy and everything else. But if you want to key your hexes and you're looking at this and you're saying, this is a sandbox, I don't know where my party is going to go, so I legit or I ultimately would like to key everything. I mean, this is a boatload of hexes, right? It's a ton.
And not only is there a ton, but there's a ton of hexes that are all at a high level, the same grasslands as far as the eye can see. Woods with the woods, all this stuff. Oh, you like those woods. Here are some woods with hills. And then you get in the mountains, mountains as far as the eye can see. Again, I think this is some kind of this might be other more grassland OSR more sort of I don't know, more maybe plains step kind of thing. I'm not sure in this maybe savannah. It's a lot.
What I would say is give yourself a break, take it easy. You might ultimately want to end up with a map that's this big. You might ultimately end up with a map that's this big. But you don't need to start out with the map that's this big. Zoom in. Say, you know what, I'm going to sit here and I'm going to do this triangle. Mewen palin and dorlo. There's nice ruins here.
Maybe we put some other stuff in here. And sure, this is still a considerable bit of work. You could even I mean, really, when you start off, you could actually say, I'm just going to start right here. I'm just going to do like a little circle one, give a buffer of a hex. I got dorlo, which is where I'll start the party here's. This first ruins that I'm going to really push them towards. I could put some minor things around here and then this is where I'm going to point them. And I'm just going to do these.
And then if they say to me at the end of the session, hey, there's another city there, right on the other side of the river, miles away. Oh, yeah, that's Mewen. We'd like to go to Mewen. Okay. And then I'll start planning. Then you plan that. So what you don't want to do is give yourself the uninvievable task of creating a massive map and then trying to fill it all. Now, if you've done that, you can still just key as you go.
That's another option. And it depends, really, it's kind of up to you and your workflow. Some folks are going to see this. And then they're going to say, I want to key every hex. And they're not going to be able to really pace themselves, and they're going to feel like, I got to key all these hexes before we start the game. If you're that kind of person, this is a trap. If you're the kind of person that can be like, hey, I'm going to make this big, I'm just going to press the generate button, random map and Worldographer or some other hex mapping app. I'm going to get this big space, but I'm going to be fine.
When I just say, I'm just going to key this little spot, then do that. But I think to the extent that you can key things up, I think that'll be better. And I think when you have them keyed because one of the things too is if you're down here in JuD and you got to go to me when this trip could be 30 seconds of game time or it could be longer. Now, you're not ever going to be able to say for sure, but if there's a whole lot of interesting things going on in these, let's see, 12345 hexes between these two places, chances are you might entice your party to at least check them out or at least have fun with. We got to avoid, oh, there's a massive giant termite mound up in here. We got to try to evade them. That's interesting. Oh, this is happening over here.
Or there's something in here. Oh, we want to check that out. You give them something. If you have nothing here, then it's just like, okay, you spend half a day or a day or whatever traveling and you're done. And then all of these you can think about all these things even though, yes, it's work to key them. They may not interact with them, which is true, but you can tie all these things together. Kind of like here you have this outside of dolo we have this ruin? This is a major ruin. There's no reason why in all these hexes, maybe even in Dorlo itself, there aren't other things that are pointing towards the ruin.
Everything is whatever this thing is. Then you're finding all these bits and clues and stuff about it and they're all saying, come to these ruins, come to these ruins. And that kind of embeds it in your setting more. You can kind of start to make you think about all this connective tissue. It's going to certainly help funnel the party can't ever be sure if they haven't said that they're going to those ruins. And it's not for sure, but at least you're kind of giving them ammunition to say, oh, right, there are those ruins. Okay, maybe this used to be the capital of some kingdom. And here you find boundary stones.
Here you find maybe a watchtower ruin, and there's a remnant of a road. And where's that road leading it's leading over to those ruins. Oh, over here there's something else. What is it leading towards? This. Maybe it's an old barrel grounds or something and it's kind of pointing again. DND it was the last big battle and it's sort of pointing towards pointing towards those ruins. You want to use these things to kind of build them up. I think the other thing sometimes with keying, and this is why you always have to be careful with tables or use them in.
Don't just roll the tables and take the result and just run with it. Put it in the context of your game, so that when you're coming up with stuff, you can use the power of these things to kind of help reinforce other elements that are there. And it doesn't feel like there's some random like here there's this and here's this totally other thing. And here's the third thing, and it's like these things don't fit together at all. They're just kind of thrown on the map. Some games, it's fine. The more gonzo your game is, the more you can just kind of have random stuff be in random spots. But for myself, I like to try to have coherence and I think that, again, that helps sort of make the party interested in the interesting places, the places you really want them to go to, because you're kind of building them up.
Those ruins may be nothing, but if you have all this stuff that's leading to them, it's going to seem important to be like, whoa, those ruins seem to be somewhere we really need to check out, because it seems to be the capital of some lost kingdom. Oh, my gosh, there's got to be some good treasure there, or whatever Bill says. What's my thoughts on squares instead of hexes on a world map? That doesn't matter too much. I mean, it's really about how caught up you are in how you want to handle the travel bit, right? Because the nice thing with a hex, and I don't know why we settle on the hexes, there could have been more, is that you have this extra movement right on a square. You've only got the four cardinal directions. Ultimately, it's not super, I don't think. It's not a deal breaker if you do. But I know that some people have gotten caught up in the fact that, for example, with these flat top hexes, that you can't if you're playing it like a board game style, right? Especially if it's player facing.
So you've got a pond that's sitting up here. You're in Mewen that you can't go directly east or west. You have to either go slightly northwest or slightly southwest of the invisible line. For me, it doesn't matter because my hexes are not player facing. So if they're somewhere in this midst, pick one or the other or roll a die. It doesn't really matter. These lines are just like cartography lines. There's.
No line on the map that's matching this. It's just and plus you can't go directly. You don't have the precision to say, I'm going to be due west and on the line. You can't do it anyway, but if that's important to you. DND you already have players, or you are bothered by the fact that there's no clean east or west, then maybe they'll bother you. If only the cardinal directions. You don't even have the northeast, southeast, northwest, southwest kind of thing. Otherwise it's more about, I guess, convention and sort of war gaming routes and things.
And look, keep on the borderlands. It's not a true wilderness map because the scale is small, but they use squares and nothing horrible happens. So I'm not going to shout heresy and burn the map down if it's got squares, but I kind of like hexes up to taste whatever works for you in your system. Magnus says they started with a hex flower, 724 miles hexes, but focused on the middle of the start. Just not sure if they should key the whole macro hex or generate on the fly. Magnus it's going to be what's most comfortable for you. If you are comfortable doing it on the fly in your game, then do it on the fly in your game. If you're more comfortable rolling things up in advance DND roll it up in advance.
You can do some of each. You can roll up the general stuff and then just have it and then kind of riff on it. Ultimately, with all these tools, no matter what tools you're looking at, you always want to look at it and say, how is this tool helping me play the way I play, the way that works best for me to play? Does this tool help me on that road to play that way to kind of optimize the way I play? OSR does it not? Or is it neutral? And ideally, you want all your tools to be helping you in the workflow that works best for you, and you want to ditch the tools or alter them if they are hindering you in what you're doing. So if generating on the fly that feeds into your imagination and you've got your juices flowing, you got your adrenaline, and so in the moment when you're playing that works for you, then bam, then do that. If you find that that's a struggle for you, then I would say try to do some of the prep beforehand until you reach that level where it's like, great, I've done as little as I need to do to get where I want to go. Because that's the thing, you don't want to prep more than you want to. There's obviously world building is fun and you can just do world building for its own sake. Totally great.
I love doing it, folks love doing it. But just in terms of prep, you want to prep the least amount to get you to the end result. You want to be as efficient as possible. So you want to look at every tool, whatever it is in that lens and don't take my word for someone else's word for it. Obviously, we can try to point you in the direction of the tools that work great for us. I can say this tool works great for me, but might not work great for you. So there's some trial and error there until you figure out the sorts of things that work best for you. And then you'll have a better idea.
When someone mentions a book or something, you'll have a better idea saying, oh, that's going to be right on my alley, or it's really not going to help me deceagon crawl. Yes. Phil said, I think it's interesting that a Hex can't travel north or northwest. Something weird, right? I mean, it's just about putting your pawn on the map in terms of the game. If you're in me win here and you want to go east or west, I'm not saying no, you can't because it's just for me. To me, I look at the hex map. It's just for me. But I know that this is the thing way back in the day, my recollection is that when they were playing with, say, the outdoor survival map, they were using pawns on a map.
And in that case, if you're doing that and that's great, then there's just a little bit of that kind of board gameiness of, hey, that's the way the board goes. You're going around the Monopoly board. You can't cut a corner, you can't shortcut. You got to go around the board. So in this case, yeah, you got to pick one. Got to go a little bit northeast or a little bit more southeast. DND them's the brakes and that's it. Or if you're using the pointy tops and bottoms, then it's north and south where you have to do.
But I feel like people get too they start thinking too much about it, like, oh my gosh, we got to pick. I mean, look, and sometimes there will be consequences because of the danger, because of the relative dangerousness of different Hexes. Let me see if I can find one. Obviously, if you need to pick between going in the woods or going in the farmland, you want to pick the farmland, but maybe that puts you slightly further away from your objective. And that's a choice you make as a player. Okay, we want to go a little bit out of our way to stay safe, or we want to be more direct here. Mountains are definitely more apt to run into something than hilly forest or depending whether it's whatever forest hills combo well, you're picking. So some of that too, is you just make your decision and you live with it.
And hopefully as a GM, if this comes up, you're just explaining to your party that don't really worry about it. You're making this approximation because we're abstracting this fictional world into this map, which really like every map that's not kind of a satellite map is doing to some degree or another. Any kind of drawn map is not going to be correct down to the inch. At some point you're saying, hey, I'm going to give you the overall shape, but understand, the ground is different. Right. The map is not the territory, as the saying says. This is just to give you an approximate idea. So since it's approximate, don't worry about it.
But since I play where my players don't see this map, I don't have to worry about that, and I can put them in whichever of those hexes I think is the appropriate one for what they're doing. Jason says we settle on the hexes because it's got the most side for all the tileable regular shapes. That's probably a good point. Terrence says squares versus hexes are the charcoal versus propane of this channel. That's great. Ryland says we just need 4D hexes. Problem solved. Hyper hex, hex cube, 5D chess with multiverse time travel.
Yes. Oh, that's true. The Pinkertons have not found me yet, so yeah, I'm good where I am. A non Euclidean polygon. Crawl. Good stuff. Yeah, all of the above. Bottom line is pick the style because remember, the map is just an approximation.
It's just a tool. I think anytime you get two, and this is why I always caution the same thing, I see people on reddit and they're like, I want to make my map pretty. And I get it. Of course you want to make your maps pretty. We all like pretty maps. But the thing is, you don't need pretty maps. And there was a while back where I did a video on it where somebody there was an evolution of their gaming maps and it went from pretty but not really, not that it was unusable, but Usability was taking a backseat to them trying to make it pretty. And then as they evolved through their process and they became less worried about how pretty it looked and more interested in the functionality, how the style kind of degenerated from being sort of artistic and, oh, this is pretty, to almost being something that looked like it was drawn with crayons.
But the crayon one had just everything that they needed to run the game. And so when you're worrying about like, oh, I can't move exactly this because of the map squares or whatever we're using or oh, I want it to be gorgeous, that stuff's great. But just remember that ultimately it's a tool for your game. And I assume, obviously, people do make maps as art pieces, but that's kind of a separate thing, right? Tool art piece. Roland says, I've seen people talking about using picture emphasized maps, little drawings all over instead of realistic maps, as that can lead to more engagement. Yeah, I've seen some videos, things. I think that's fine. And it's not like those things didn't exist.
When you look at old medieval maps and things, I forget the you see those? I should have just pulled up. There was one. Is there one that's more territorial? Here we go. I don't want to shop for the maps. I just want to see the map. Is this a good one? Let me see if I can get in here bigger. That's a city map. Hold on a minute.
What is this? I can't even really tell what this? But I'm guessing this is mountains. What is this? This is probably a bad example, having a hard time even figuring out what is going on there. All right, let me get a different one. Hold on. That's not a good one. Hold on a minute. Let's get out of here. Let's do first, let's make sure we've got good sizes.
Where's the sizing? Here we go. Image size. Let's make sure we can get extra large. Extra large. Maybe I should just I don't know if medieval maybe I shouldn't do medieval because they might not even be the best ones. Maybe more of those Renaissance type maps. Oh, I'm not going to find a good 01:00 a.m. I.
What is this? I think this is a city again, I think but you get the idea. Hey, ink penn. Ron. Oh, let's see that's. Ron basically fill your mouse with emojis. Yes, but, you know, put I mean, I someone made the point on I want to say it was on I saw a YouTube video. I forget who it was. But they have really good videos on drawing maps.
Was making the point, though. They were talking more about player facing maps. So if you have a map and your party is going to see it, of putting on the map, kind of an indication of what's there. So you might put if you have ant, lions let me go back to speaking. I shouldn't put my glasses in my mouth. So imagine, if you will, that there's somewhere in here, there's an ant line layer. So you would draw an ant line in here and over here, there's, I don't know, something a necromancer. So you might put a skeleton here or something, right? So the players get these visual concepts they can see visually.
So let's just say here, right, we've got they're in Miwin, and they've been told they need to get to the Red River and get to Lo Mende. And for some reason you can't go to Dola. Dola is off limits. Maybe it's a different kingdom, whatever. And so now the players are looking at the map and like, okay, we're in Me win. Oh, easy. We're just going to just ride across the plains like Magnificent Seven towards Le Mende. But then you see there's this ant line thing over here.
But then there's an owl bear over here. And then you see maybe some orcs face of an ORC or something over here. Now you're giving them these visual decision points. What do we want to do? Can we skirt around the ant lions without getting into the orcs maybe there's something going on over here. Right. So you're giving them context to make decisions, which I think especially in, say, a fifth edition OSR style game where so they don't emphasize terrain. I think when I went over when that latest starter set came out and when I went over their hex oh, no, sorry. I was looking at their Dungeon Master screen that had kind of wilderness travel stuff on there.
I believe, if I'm remembering correctly, they didn't really have anything different. Terrain didn't matter. Hills versus plains, they didn't differentiate in terms of what was happening. So whereas we, from an OSR background, might look and say, well, yeah, sure, I understand that the easiest path in terms of least encounters and fastest movement is taking the planes. As soon as I go into those woods and these hills, I'm slowing down. So I want to cut across here. But now that there's an ant lion nest here, that's another decision point for me. This is the fastest.
But now I know there's this danger here. It's not just a wandering creature. They're here. How do I deal with them? In a game that doesn't really feature much terrain differentiation, then having those kinds of visual context is even more important, because now the party could just say, well, it doesn't make any difference from movement if we loop around and come through the hills like that. It's just narrative. It doesn't matter. Well, suddenly, if there are orcs here and there's a necromancer here and the ant lines are here, suddenly now we have something to consider. So if you're giving your party player facing maps, I think that's excellent idea to do.
And I've done that with names. I haven't done that with drawings yet in terms of putting things on my map, but I've done it with names where I had something like these ruins weren't nameless like they are here. I had one called the Cave of Thieves. I had another one where it said Temple with a question mark. I had another one that said, like, abandoned city, I think also with a question mark. And the idea was that surveyors and people had gone out and they'd come back to this one place and they'd said, like, this is what we saw, but we're not sure. The locals told us this, but we don't know if it's true. But they kind of would just write like, well, this is what we know so far, called the Cave of Thieves.
But by giving it these names, even if they're question marks, even if I would talk about this stuff is not official in any way, it gives context. And my players, they were like, OOH then of Thieves. They probably got loot in there because they've been thieving. If this is really a thieves thieves a location where thieves are layering hanging out then there's going to be loot. So we want to go there and then later on they're like oh man, I really want to see what that temple is like in those woods. These are all things that will help your players figure out what to do which is in important. Especially if you're playing the more pure sandbox you're playing the more that something's important because you have to give them data. If they're just looking at this map and everything kind of looks the same then how are they supposed to choose? I mean we're in me win where do we go from here? I don't know it's great door load JuD there's a thing with a gate there looks like stonehenge that looks like a ruin but I can't differentiate between them how am I supposed to pick? Maybe I pick one just because it's closer, but really, it's not a lot of information.
Whereas if I give them names and then, of course, you can get into rumors and all this other stuff, you're building up all this context. And I think having that visually on a map, if your players have a map, can be really helpful for them. What did I miss in the chat? Let's see yeah, I forget what the style is but it don't matter. Ink fences I think that's why I love hex maps so much absolutely. So, yes, we can go back to while they wait questions new we can go back to my little procedure here, my work in progress procedure or really it's kind of filling out these tables. So I mentioned the alignment that you could think about giving a and I probably wouldn't give it to a single hex. I mean, you could if that single hex is a singular thing like a weird lonely hill and that hill is just one hex and something but I think of it usually in terms of regions and then you could think about kind of themes and the themes would be if it's neutral. It's neutral.
It just is what it is. Whereas if you end up on the chaos OSR law DND of it, you think about these I came up with four. We could probably come up with more that are split between whether the one is kind of more law and the one is more chaos. So you have life and death, something that you see an environment is flourishing, everything's super vibrant, right? This is the one that's law it's super vibrant right? Whereas the neutral one is just regular. The grass is green, trees are in bloom. But then you go to the one that's law and it's like the grass is super green and the blooms are the biggest you've ever seen and everything is just amped up. And then, of course, if you end up on the chaos side, then that same thing would be just things are dying. It's not just because it's fall, it's spring, and yet you see hardly a fresh stalk.
All the leaves are withered, the trees are bent and gnarled like nothing, right? It just feels like it's just dead. And then you have positive negative energy. If you want to think about this would be more for. It's kind of similar to life death, but I also thought about sort of things like, well, negative energy. You might see a lot of undead kind of phenomena might be in there. I'm not sure for the positive side, it could be more that sort of I'm not sure because I can see life death positive negative being kind of same, but negative, I always felt like, is even more so positive. I'm not sure how that would differentiate from life, but I might have to think about that. And then growth, decay.
Is it redwoods and everything's huge and just seems to be just to a massive scale or everything's not the one time was life and death like it's all dead, decay. You've probably seen everything's rotted and everything is like it's got like all the things of just all the life, all the creatures that sort of feast on decay are there an abundance full of flies and fungus and all the kind of things that we deal with. Decay again, I just came up with these a few minutes for the stream, so it's a little bit half baked in terms of how we probably it seems like there's a lot of overlap between these, but this is kind of my idea. And then the kind of nature versus abomination nature. Everything fits the natural order of things, right? You got your pyramid of plants and then herbivores, and then the predators, and I don't know, apex predator. Somewhere there's scavengers, and then of course, abomination. It's like all kinds of weird, twisted stuff. There's creatures that aren't meant to be, but a bee kind of here, which has some overlap with the other things, but that's what I'm thinking.
Hey, Magnus. Have a great night. Thanks for joining while you could. Ink pen asked if I've seen the dwarf fortress. World generation has evil regions. I have not seen it. I did hear about that. There was isn't there a new version of dwarf fortress? Because obviously dwarf fortress has been around forever, but I thought there was a new version came out that I'd heard about.
It was one of those games I've always wanted to play but never really played. I was always daunted by the interface. I'll have to check that out. Ink Pen does dwarf fortress, the world generation, does it make something that you can export in some way, or how does it work? Is it something where it might be an interesting tool? Because I would definitely check it out, maybe stream a look at it on the channel. If there was a way to pull it out of Dwarf Fortress if it's just kind of for kicks. New version has decent graphics. Okay. I did see there was some controversy about the new version, but again, being not at all in tune with Dwarf Fortress, I don't know what the controversy is or whether it's meaningful to us.
Yeah. Decent compared to compared to ASCII. Yeah. I always thought the ASCII was kind of charming. You know what I really like? I feel like more games are not enough. Games do enough with it where you can kind of just set. Maybe you could do this in dwarf fortress I never saw. But I really would just like to see the dwarves do things without my intervention.
Because part of the things that I'm not super interested in or when I I've seen some videos of people playing dwarf fortress and they have to go through and they're making all the beds and they got to do all this stuff. I don't want to do that. I'd rather just be like, I want to just plant a dwarf colony in an interesting place and then kind of like The Sims, or at least that concept of The Sims from when it first came out is like, I just want to see what happens when I hit, like, start your colony and does it flame out? Does it come up? Maybe I can roll the dice on a few things I'd love, like a GM or God mode for Dwarf Fortress, where I can just put some interesting situations out there, and then hopefully there's some kind of algorithms or AI that kind of help make them seem living in some way reactive to their environments. There's a game that's a solo art TTRPG that is a dwarf colony builder. Oh, interesting steam version. It's self contained, but you can pull to Icy. Okay. I'll have to check it out.
It'd be cool if we could find a way maybe I have to look online. If there's a way to pull out the mask from Dwarf Fortress into something else or just out into some form. I suppose there's always print screen, but be cool if there's a way to pull it out with the data kind of intact in some way. So what I thought, what I taught, we could do a melodic method. Welcome says, under what conditions would I break a hex down into subhexes? The condition would probably be that they are engaging with the hex as opposed to moving through it. So probably when they're in the hex that they want to get to, or at least they think they are, that's when I might break it down. When they're going to spend more time, I guess, ultimately, are they going to be spending more than just a session there? So let's go back to whoops. I don't mean to move it.
I want to move myself. Let's go back to the big board. Probably not. I wouldn't break down this hex no reason to me win and farmland don't need it. Same thing for all these I don't need to break these down. I wouldn't just break these down either. They're moving, they're moving, they're moving. They're moving now.
They move in and they encounter what was I saying before? There's an ant line colony in here. So do I need to break down that hex into subhexes? Probably not. If they're just going to deal with that in a moment or evade or something and move on, probably not. If they decide we're going to hunker down in here and exterminate the ant lion colony, that's probably when I feel like I would want to break it down in subhexes. Same thing. If this ruin is their final destination and they need to find it, maybe and they're going to be bouncing around, they're going to be looking for camp, they're going to be making a semi permanent campsite. There something where at least they're going to be a base that's temporary, but not temporary just overnight, but for maybe a week or some long period of time. They're digging into the hex, then I would want to break it down into a subhex.
Now you never know where you might need them because if we're keying our hexes and we put something in here and suddenly they take a real shine to it and decide to go delving, then you just kind of got to make a judgment call and then just try to break it down. You can use some depending on how you're breaking it down, maybe you can roll a couple of D Sixes or something to put things in there. But I would wait to see where they're going to spend more time and if it looks like they're going to spend more time there and it's easy enough to do, break it down, definitely. Maybe if you're thinking of advance, maybe you want to take it's not named here, but if this were a named location they were onto, maybe you feel like you're going to be there, but you don't have to because if there's only the one thing really in there, then you have to think about it's. That kind of right. That time versus reward is knowing exactly or what does knowing exactly where those ruins are, or at least in a little bit more detail, what does it do for you? Does it matter if it doesn't really matter if you're looking going, they're going to go to the ruins and this is all just grasslands anyway and there's really nothing else. They're going to camp somewhere and they're going to go, it probably doesn't matter. So I'm not going to worry about it.
Maybe I want to know. They might ask, oh, where are these ruins exactly? And you'll say, oh, you find them. It's on the river, it's okay, it's on the southern edge. Maybe pick something just for reference in the fiction. But other than that, I don't really care. That doesn't really matter. If it seems like it's going to matter, if they're starting to invest more and more time in it and it makes sense and the things they're doing might require more granularity in terms of the context, then you probably want to break it out. Yeah.
Rylan mentions the pizza triangles. Yeah, that's another way to do it. Break these down into kind of slices and you can think about which quadrant they're in. There's really no wrong way to do it. It's just a matter of it's kind of how granular do you want to get? And I think you just want to figure out try to eyeball or get a good sense of how specific or how granular are they going to be asking me? What are they going to be asking me for? What's important now, if you have, like, the ruins are here and some kind of bad guy layer is in here and there's maybe somebody else in here. Right. You're starting to get different factions are in play. Then it's going to become more important that you space them out and then you're going to want to know, okay, the bad guys are in this part of the hex, the parties in this part of the hex.
The ruins are here, and something else is here. When you're getting into where the hex is, those hex contents and the contents of the hex and their locations with regards to each other become more important, then you're going to want to keep them straight. If it's just it's just kind of here, deal with it and then move on, then I would say don't bother. No, sorry. My cousin Baldin played that game. Haven't heard about it since. Oh, Ink Pen says it's against the slave lords. Nice.
Ray LC says there's a Lord of the Rings video game coming out where you build a dwarf stronghold underground. Oh, yeah, I heard about that. Right. A moria survival game. Yeah, that could be fun. Osorin asked, do I ever use maps for exploring specific cities? I don't I don't find them particularly useful because I don't feel the need to get more granular than kind of your neighborhood or where generally things are. I think they're fine. I like them.
Who has it that has the Cool city generator? Well, I guess there's a few of them now. I think they're cool. I don't end up using them. I think I like them best where they just kind of tell you where the districts are or neighborhoods next to each other. But also my cities, for the most part are much smaller than a lot of times we get into kind of fantasy mode where it's like, cities are huge, like my cities and where my party currently is in my game. The cities here are probably the size of most people's towns, so just knowing, like, oh, yeah, you find where the inn is in the. Travelers district is kind of enough. If there's something fancy like the river, like lo mende, the river splits.
I might want to decide, oh, the trade district is on one side of the river and the Noble district is on the other side of the river and maybe make a note of it, but that might not even matter too much. I probably would wait. For me, it was like, is the party doing something where knowing the specific, anything more specific than that is going to be really important? Because even if I'm running a chase, let's say through the city, I'm probably going to have it abstracted out. I'm probably not going to be as if I'm narrating a chase through Manhattan. I'm going to turn at 34th street and go east and I'm going to go on the Broadway and then go halfway a block and then I'm going to turn and then you do this. I'm not doing that. I'm probably going to do something more abstracted and generic for a chase. So I don't find it useful to have all the granularity of all the different city blocks and things.
But again, my cities are small and maybe it'll come up and then I will need it, but it hasn't really been something I've needed so far. But I do enjoy looking at them. I think for myself, there are other things that I feel like I could spend my time on that are more useful than pawning out streets. But of course, if you have a city generator that you can just hit a button and you get one, then it doesn't really cost you anything, so you could have some fun with it. Let's see. I don't think I missed anything in the chat. I think I'm all caught up. Just going to scroll up just in case I missed a question or something, but I don't think I did.
I think methinks sorry. I said just curious. I'm sure some people do. And if I was playing something like was it patolis or something where the city kind of is the thing, then maybe I'd want to get into that because it's almost like the city is your dungeon or at least one of your dungeons. But even then I would probably come up with something that was more like a hex map of the city than street by street, but more power to the folks that invest that much. I just hope they get out as much as they put in to creating them. All right, we got landmarks, clues, secrets. I have the theming.
Again, I'll probably need to work on these a little bit. There might be too much overlap. I was trying to fill up a D four, but I could probably I don't know if there's enough differentiation. Particularly positive negative energy might not be enough. Maybe I'd have to go. Like maybe a better one is I don't know. I was going to say like infernal. What's the opposite of infernal? Besides and I don't like angelic.
Is there something else? I'll just put in parentheses right now. Kind of infernal. Let's see. All right. So I was going to come up with a list of natural phenomena. Well, I was just thinking, so you have a hill. A hill kind of a tour, something that stands out. That's one thing.
Obviously, opposite a hill, you have a valley, ravine, a lake or pond, river or stream. What else? Supernal. Is that the opposite? I mean, I'll put it in there. I'll look it up later. Or maybe holy unholy. Might be. Maybe that maybe a better one. Just a little bit easier.
Just there we go. What could we have? I mean, there's obviously there's a mountain. I guess I'll put that hill tour. That's fine. A valley or ravine, a lake or a pond, a river or stream. Then you just have variations kind of on those. Right. Is there something forest? Might be one.
So swamp might be another. So the idea here is obviously in a swamp hex, your swamp would not be your landmark, but it might be if you are traveling through a hill country. Right. So there's a little bit of a you could probably break this down. Maybe I will at some point get into for different terrain types. Because if you're in the hill country, then another hill, unless it's really unusual, not going to be the landmark. It's probably going to be something else. If you're in a swamp, swamp is not going to be your landmark.
Something else will be landmark. But if you're in a forest, a swamp kind of subhex feature in the forest would make sense as a landmark. So to a river or stream or a lake or a pond. But obviously, if you're on a lake and you're traveling around, you're looking for a landmark in a lake hex, then the lake itself is not your landmark. But it might be a forest. There might be a grove of trees over there. That's the kind of thing we're looking for. I might need to break those up into terrain types, but I'm not going to do it now.
Not going to do it now. Then for monuments. What are you doing? We've got a memorial. Let's see. I have markers separate from monuments. Right. So that would be memorial. Might be a memorial.
Covers a lot of ground. What kind of monument could one be? A memorial celebration? I don't know. It's probably not the right word. Memorial. Specifically, like a remembrance, maybe of the dead. There might be a oh, Fluffy group. Thank you, Fluffy. So I've been going on a great journey of stable diffusion lately, and it's really interesting.
It's a somewhat of a different workflow than what you call it mid journey. But there's some really fascinating things you can do. And one of the things you can do is you can train your own models. They're not full fledged models. I don't know how far get in the weeds on this. But essentially, Mid Journey and these other ones, they use a model, and the model is trained on I don't know how many thousands, millions of pieces of content out there. And that's part of the problem with it, right, is because they didn't ask permission for a lot of folks to use their stuff. They just sucked it all up like a giant vacuum cleaner, and they've got it.
Mid Journey has a model, and there are different models. And so what you're doing is when you're putting in a prompt, the text is sort of transformed, and I think they call it a clip. And then that's sort of fed into the model. And then the model, this whole transformation process of that text into this thing that the machine understands. Machine tries to take stuff out of the model and sort of mash it together in some way to get something approximating what was put into it and then it spits it out on the other side. So Mid Journey has got that going. Now, stable diffusion has its own model. In fact, multiple models that you can do.
Now, the models Mid Journey, I think because they have money behind it and I think it's private, whatever their model is fairly advanced. Stable diffusion is, at least the ones I'm using, kind of open source. Whatnot the models aren't as advanced as Mid Journey. So you can get really good results. But what you can do is you can do really they have so much fun things you can do with stable diffusion in terms of mixing and matching stuff. One thing you can do is you can't I mean, I suppose if you had the hardware and everything, you could train your own and you had the amount of images and things, you could train your own model, just your own big model. But that's not realistic for anybody. Or maybe I don't know who could do it.
But what you can do is they have this thing you can do where you can basically train a small model on something kind of specific, and then you can kind of attach that model to whatever the main model you're using. And so I found all this out because I'm just discovering all this stuff over the past couple of weeks. I made a model of myself because I thought people were doing this. I thought, oh, this is kind of funny. So I took some pictures of myself, I think, like 40 or 50 pictures, different things, just that I had on my phone and different things. I put it in there and I use this online thing to generate this model of myself. So then what I can do is I can put in a prompt and I can reference myself through my little model. And then that little model then kind of feeds myself into the big model and then you can try to do fun stuff and there's a lot of other things, but I've been having a lot of fun.
DND there's other things you can do with taking existing images and kind of painting into them. So the one I did for this dream today was the famous George Harrison album cover. All things shall pass or all things must pass. So I think it was his first solo album after the Beatles where he's sitting on the stool in this kind of open meadow and in the original version there he's got gnomes. I don't know if they're stone gnomes kind of hanging around him, but it's funny because when he took that with the gnomes and I didn't put the gnomes in my prompt, I just put like, I am on a stool in the field. DND referenced that image as I went through a bunch of generations of it. It transformed the gnomes into like bushes and things, but it's a lot of fun. My wife is like, Why are you doing all these images of yourself? And I'm like, Because it just makes me laugh.
To me, it's just no fun. Like the one I did, I think for the Friday stream is I took a screenshot. I'm a big fan of the movie the 13th Warrior and there's a scene where bullvi and the gang first they first have audience with the local lord and Bullvi sort of kneeling and I took that and kind of put myself in that. It cracks me up. It's a lot of fun. But you need to have I don't have a super because I had to get a new desktop because my laptop, which is actually doing okay right now, but other things if you were on my attempted streams before, I was trying to stream a look at one of these VTTs that has one of these 3D VTTs. It totally crashed my laptop. I had to get something, replace it and the desktop I ended up getting is not like a super high end desktop.
I can't afford it right now. But it ended up having a video card that's kind of on the low end but can kind of run stable diffusion because everything runs on the GPU. So mid journey you're sending it off to a server, it's doing everything, you don't need anything, which is cool. And you can do online stuff with stable diffusion too. But if you want to have everything, then usually it's kind of have to pay or there's limits. But I realized that I found out that my GPU has enough gram or VRAM, whatever it is, and can run it and so, yeah, I've gotten a lot of kicks out of it. Well, I appreciate you enjoying at some point maybe it'll get old for me, but it's fun. DND you can see they're kind of morphing as I'm sort of learning more about how to use some of the tools they have.
The nice thing I'll say this nice thing about table diffusion, unlike mid Journey, is you have a lot of different tools that you can use. So there are tools you can use to help pose, to help get a particular pose. There are tools you can use to kind of mimic more of the image. So I was able to take that album cover image and have something that really came back looking a lot fairly close to it. Whereas that would be a lot harder in mid journey because you can't specify things. You have a lot more control, a lot more control, a lot more sort of toys. But it also takes a lot more work. It's a lot more like I sent some to my mom, my sister, my mom's like, oh, I want you to make one for me.
Maybe I can, but it's a little bit more work. My sister is like, what app are you using? It's like, well, it's complicated. It's not like mid journey. It's not just this one app. It's kind of like I had to spend a while to figure all this stuff out and it was a lot of fun. So kind of like world building, right? It was a lot of fun, but it was a lot of work. And that work. I'm glad I can use it for the channel to do stuff that I can say I got some use out of it, but ultimately it's just work I'm doing because I'm just fascinated by the stuff and it's a bunch of fun, but I'm glad you like it.
I was wondering if people are really going to even notice or care or anything like that about it. Hopefully people get it. That's all I ask. All right, so back to monuments. We've got a memorial, which I'm thinking it's like so and so a memorial. I don't know if celebration is the right word. Like, I'm thinking like, maybe I'll call it a triumph. Like the archbitrion, the triumphant arch or something else.
Why? What other kind of monuments might we have? Because I feel like memorial, probably some kind of battle thing would fit under memorial or triumph or both. I suppose maybe I could just not even have this table and just have it be a memorial. I don't know. Do I even need I mean, I'm sure I could think of something. I don't know. What would be a religious I don't know. Not really, because a shrine I would put as a structure. I forgot to put why not a religious battle? Where would it be so landmark? What would a battle site be? Would that be a different that might be its own thing.
Maybe I'll put it on OSR site. Like a structure or site. Let's see. I didn't call someone. So we got some kind of ruin, a tower stronghold. Or maybe I should put castle, because I guess a tower technically is like a I wonder how like to see me as a gnome. I wonder how how granular I see for myself. I don't feel like I need too much, but since I always have an eye on to make these things available for other folks, I wonder how granular to get with these because I could just do like tower stronghold for basically tower castle and then just figure it out at the moment.
But I know other folks would like to milan says they've been looking for some live plays that use hex maps to get a better feel for what they're good for. Interesting. Have you not found any ryland, I'm curious. I don't really watch any live plays. I used to watch a bit of the jordoba stuff, but I don't remember them doing any hex hexing around. Hopefully someone else. Anyone else in the chat? I mean, watching the live place. I know that down the line I hear about their live place a lot, but I have never watched it, so I don't know.
I know other folks do OSR playthroughs, but there are any that do folks, you're out there, anybody do any that are hex that utilize hex maps? Do some wilderness adventuring? Fluffy the Griffin said Vander's Keep was doing some hex exploration demonstration videos. Maybe I need to do that. Maybe I need to do I'm going to try to get together with Bandits Keep again for a video, I think for a stream. Another convo I think we're going to do. I got a hold of him over the weekend. I think we might try to do a solo play conversation. I should do an exploration kind of thing. Maybe I'll have to do that.
Maybe I'll do that sooner rather than later. It'd probably have to be something solo. Unless I can get somebody to sit in with me to be kind of a player. Jason said three to six down the line has their Dolman Wood campaign. Current Arden Vul is a mega dungeon crawl. Jason is their Dolman Wood campaign. Did that have any wilderness elements or was it mostly not? Or did they use hex maps or were they doing point crawling or just nothing? I wonder if I should do like a split this up into two so instead of having ruined something, maybe make the status ruined. Actually, can I push this ruined? Okay, it did have hex crawl.
So maybe ryan, check out the check out three to six down the line. To be honest, it's on my list of things to do. I would love to play DND, maybe get in some other folks games that are streaming kind of thing. I'd love to run my own games. I need to get things in order in multiple ways, unfortunately, before I'll be able to do that. But it's definitely on my long term list of things to do. A but you know, it's stuff like I need to be able to get time aside and I don't know if I was going to organize the game by myself, for myself. If I need to fund it in some way, I don't have the funding to do it myself.
I don't know how people do it. They just do it like, hey, if it was like, I don't know, I can get bandits, keep OSR somebody and maybe another person to play. I'm sure it could just be like a friendly kind of thing. I don't know if I was getting other people whether I'd have to. I don't know how that works. I'm sure some folks are able to they fund their games and have folks come in and are able to pay for their time, but I can't do that yet. The channel is nowhere near self sustaining as it is. Forget trying to do something like that.
But if I could get something kind of friendly, I thought maybe something I do as a stop gap. And again, I'm just spitballing here is do like, some one shots with a couple of people just to kind of do it, and maybe it's just, hey, come on, and we'll run a one shot. Do something like that. That might be fun. Try some different systems. I got some ideas, but I got to get the time and I got to kind of get like I said, I got to get things in order, but it's in the things I want to do. Mr Hobbes. He runs some west matches.
Terrence, your group, 15 years. Well, those are all like I mean, I forget. I'm sure you probably told me your group, but I feel like you guys were playing before in Morphine or did you guys get together to do the streaming thing? Refresh my memory. I'm thinking more for folks who are getting on just to do for the stream as opposed to taking an existing gaming group and then streaming it. What was it doing? So kind of a hut, homestead. I could see a village or hamlet. I don't know if I can see a town being kind of unknown, but I suppose I guess this is the feature. Well, yeah, I guess I would say maybe you take a city.
Oh, I guess. Why not? Why the heck not? And then some kind of stronghold tower was this 1234 and then temple or religious complex. Okay, that's what I thought about being. Yeah, I knew you guys were an existing group, but for me it's a little bit different. I'm pretty cognizant of not in wanting to put pressure or anything on my home game. DND it's already tough for us to find time DND stuff. I'd want to get some people together who want to do it to stream. And again, I don't know the ins and outs of how a lot of people run their games, because I would want just to be a game, but I also want like, okay, we're coming on to do this thing something I want to do, but I got to probably ask some people.
Maybe I can get with Terrence and ask him some questions. I could pester him on discord or ask some other folks who kind of run a stream game for some advice. But I would like to do something. I got to get stuff in order. That's all. I mean, that's a lot, but that's all. All right, so for structures and sites, hut, homestead, Village, OSR Town, city strongholder, tower, Temple, or religious conflicts, then you could roll to see what the condition of said thing is, which goes from ranges from destroyed to pristine. Yeah, that's the thing.
Jason exactly right. If I'm going to stream it and it's not a one shot, then it needs to be consistent. Yeah. And my home game is inconsistent. DND that's another thing. Like just figuring out with my family which night works the best for being able to 19 out of 20 times be able to be available, unless it's something that we don't I don't know. No, I think I'd rather just stream it because I was thinking, like, well, I could not stream it and just edit it and put it out that way, but I'd have to pay somebody to do it for me because I don't want to do it myself. I can edit it.
I am able to edit the video. I don't want to. Yeah. Jason, I agree with you on the face cams. I know some folks don't like to do it. I know that folks don't feel like they're handsome or whatever enough, but I think you just got to get over it and do it. I think being able to put faces to the voices and seeing reactions and seeing everything, it's super important. Terrence says they're consistent, consistently obnoxious.
But you do upload every week, and I feel like, Terrence, you guys are uploading like, five times a week. I don't know how you guys do it. Every time I turn around, I feel like there's a new one of your streams. Okay, so we got natural phenomena. We've got structures and sites. We got the status or condition of same, which actually would work for our monuments. Also, we can use this status for multiple things. Fluffy the river says running a game as a stream is a bit different from running a game as is.
It's a bit more work to pull off. Yes. Though I think Fluffy, to that end, I think my goal for it would be to try to run it as close to as is as I can without it becoming a slog. Like, I'd want to reduce table talk. Some is fine. A little bit is fine. But I think part of the reason for me wanting to do it would be so that someone could go and say, well, what is this? Kind of like to run it and be able to see a reasonable facsimile. I know, a lot of streams started out that way and they got more produced and kind of moved away from it.
I think Critical Role has been like that too. Whereas if you watch early Critical Role, I don't really have much experience with Critical Role, but my understanding is that if early episodes of Critical Role are much more closer to having the mechanics exposed and now it's more obfuscated, just they just don't kind of get into it as much. Not that it's not there and that you can't follow it, but just that they just have structured things so that it's not more at the fore. But I think at least, and maybe I would just follow the same path as everyone else, where I would start being more mechanics, sort of more real game forward and then presuming that it was successful in the sense I want to keep doing it, then you'd kind of want to get more produced. If it's successful, you put more money into it, you doing things and so you want to get more produced. But my initial goal is so you can kind of see a game kind of as is DND some reasonable facsimile about how a real game might be and not it's a show with sort of a game hidden in there somewhere. Jason says the group that got him into watching actual plays was Thursday Nights and they were all about showing how it is. I never heard of Thursday Nights, but I guess they're defunct, unfortunately.
It's a shame. Jason, is their stuff still up somewhere or is it totally gone Thursday nights? Fluffy says they tried live streaming on Twitch. Did it for about six months, but I got exhausting, had to monitor chat, do it again, do it straight to video. I think the thing is, Fluffy, what you want to do and this is kind of part of that journey. And again, if I'm boring folks with this, you can pull me back onto topic, but when you're doing anything so my journey as a YouTube, doing YouTube stuff, look, I got slow growth, whatever, it's happening. But there was a period of time in which I would stream DND there'd be nobody there or one person and then they'd leave. Actually, my Twitch is still like that. If you look at the Twitch stream summaries, for some reason on Twitch I'm a total non entity.
One person will be there, then they'll be gone. It just what happens. But the thing is you have to just power through. You got to power through and then eventually so for instance look, I just want to thank you guys. I'm so blessed that I can stream on a day or night and I'm fairly sure that at least a handful of people will come on and join me and hang out who are active more or less in the chat. I can kind of count on that now. Pretty much. Obviously I haven't tried like, I'm going to stream at 03:00 A.m.
And see who shows up. No, but if I'm trying to keep to my more or less normal schedule or like this, I'm streaming off schedule, but it's at night, which I think actually is probably people are more available than they are because I lose the European folks. But for all the sort of folks who are on more or less the same time table as me, I can count on some people being there. Then once you get to the fact that you're counting on some people being there, then maybe you could deputize a couple of people to watch the chat for you to kind of be your sort of chat person or have somebody else at your table have one of your players monitor the chat. Or eventually, like you do if you get enough, is you're able to have a producer person whose literally job is to watch the stream and watch the chat and you just play. But you're not going to get there all at once. So if you're serious about it, if you want to do it, you're just going to have to live with the fact that, okay, I'm going to have to want my chat. I'm going to have to do these things.
Jason nobody else knows I have Twitch either. I mean, I stream simultaneously. I'm not a twitch partner. I'm not in the thing. So when I go to YouTube, I do multi streaming. So it goes to Facebook. It goes does something on Twitter. I don't know any of the metrics on Twitter.
I have no idea if anybody watches me on Twitter. Facebook, which I don't think anybody watches me on Facebook. YouTube, which is pretty much where everybody is, but I also sent it to Twitch. But nobody watches on Twitch. I don't know if it's just too crowded a field or if I'm not the kind of thing that Twitch folk are looking for. I don't know. But I don't really advertise either because it just got to the point where I'm like, I don't see me getting any traction. And I stopped streaming to Twitch for a while.
I just turned it back on. It's probably been about a year maybe or so, maybe a little less. Why I turned it back on because for a while I just turned it off because nothing's happening there. So why do it? But I decided I'll just stream there and maybe it'll catch fire someday. And if not if not, I am simulcasting. Yeah, it just lets me cover some bases. So I do it. But I guess the point is go back to what sort of what Fluffy brought up is that you just kind of got to do it.
And it's going to be a paint at first, and then hopefully you're able to keep at it. And then you'll get some folks in who and folks will want to help you. People are. Super nice. You guys are super nice with me that will step in and maybe say, hey, I can moderate the chat or I can do something while you're playing, but you got to do it in baby steps. And you're going to have to go through that point where you're streaming to Nobody. And it's a weird thing when I'm looking at a little eyeball camera, or in this case it's a webcam looking at the webcam, which looks like a little how eyeball looking at me. And then you're doing that, and then you look at your stream go, oh wow, nobody's watching me.
But I got to keep talking because if I just stop, then it can't stop. I said I was going to talk about this. I'm going to be here for an hour. So I guess I'm going to be talking for an hour and hopefully somebody will show up sometime and say hello. And it's really weird, but you do it. And the thing is, what would you call these talking head videos, right? It's just me. If I was playing a game, that would be slightly easier, right? If I was playing, oh, let me play disco. Elysium that's okay because I could just play the game and just eye side eye the chat.
But when I literally am doing nothing but essentially looking at this Ouija board DND then looking at the camera when nobody was here, it was super weird. But you just got to do it. You just got to do it. And then eventually some folks tune in and then a few more folks tune in, and then before you know it, you have folks who are tuning in and then you get more comfortable. DND as long as a few people are here that are interacting with me, then I can go on. And if there's nobody here, then I just got to just say, darn it, I hope somebody shows up. And then the other thing is, because they end up being videos later, I want to finish my thoughts and do what I was going to say and then turn off the stream and console myself with, I don't know, warm tea for the working man. Streaming to Nobody is super weird.
I appreciate that. Fluffy says that YouTube is better as a streaming experience. Yeah, I think there's just weird things, right. I started on YouTube so it's just naturally that more folks are going to YouTube and then again, maybe just twitch is just different. It's okay. I'm not super bothered by it. If I was only trying to do twitch if YouTube streaming didn't exist DND twitch was it, then it would be more strange to me. I might be pulling my what little hair I have left, pulling it out, trying to figure out why I don't get better numbers on twitch.
But at this point, it's just kind of it is what it is. And who knows, I don't know, maybe there needs to be a new streaming platform that I can be I can get on a new streaming platform early. But it's fine. I think YouTube's been fine for me, it's always good. The other thing is, it's always good to have another option, something right, because people have had weird things happen with YouTube. I'm sure they've had it with Twitch too, where your channel gets killed for reasons and then you just can't get back in. Or it's a big rigor world to get back in and then if you're all in on one, then it's kind of like you're stuck. So that's another reason why it's good to if you're not necessarily streaming to all them, to just keep putting your stuff other places so that if the worst thing happens, you have some kind of backup of everything.
Oh, before I forget, I have that poll running. I did it on my forums. I'm trying to encourage folks to go to the forums and it's not just because I want people to come visit the forums, which I do. Forums hex press. But again, kind of on the thing of like I feel that my community is a bit scattered. Some folks do stuff on YouTube I can put a thing and then some folks, other folks are not there. And I know that if I'm on my TV, like for me, the device I watch YouTube on, mostly is my TV, and my TV I can't interact with the community tab. So having a poll on the community tab for someone like me who is mostly seeing stuff on my TV is worthless.
For folks who are looking at it on their phone or their iPad, maybe to go to the community tab. But anyway, I put it on my forums. Voting for what we're going to do tomorrow. And thanks Terrence for the naming toolkit Tuesday. So I think you have to register for the forms to vote. I know a bunch of you are registered already, the regulars are registered already, but nobody a lot of you don't come to the forms, but go there and remember your login and vote for tomorrow. Otherwise I'm just going to choose something. I think I have one vote right now, which means that tie goes to me if I vote for something else.
Should have kept my shirt on. Hey now, nothing. Your whole life is streaming to nobody. Yeah, that's how I feel. No, it's all good. It is all good. It is nice that I'm blessed that I can just say right now, knock on particle board that I don't have to do that much anymore. I mean, it's happened.
Every once in a while I'll start a stream, especially if I forget to notify folks like the Friday, not this Friday, but every once in a while, like a Friday or one of the streams will start up and there'll be a couple of minutes and there'll be nobody watching. I just got to keep talking and then now I have faith that if I just keep talking long enough, somebody's going to show up and people do DND. That's all you can ask for. All right, pads. Let's see. So I've been going almost 2 hours. I'm by myself. The other thing so if this was a regular weeknight, I wouldn't be able to really do this.
I'd be in kind of family time, but I'm by myself up here, so I can do this. All right, we got a game trail. We won a footpath. About one word or two guess it's one a how do you spell it? Like a cart track, then a road. Actually, I'm not the other person who voted. I haven't voted yet, Terrence. I was just going to wait till the end. So yeah, one person voted.
I think they voted for a magic item. So now I'll be curious to see. Let me just see. I got it open here. Let's see. Oh, three votes. Wow. Everyone with magic item.
So the will of the people. All three of you. Magic item. All right, good to know. I'll check back later. So, yeah, now unless I want a magic item, I will be thwarted. That's all right. Happy to do it.
I feel like a magic item, depending on what it is. Might be fast nest. I mean, I say that I guess it depends on what the magic item is. We'll have to figure that out. That's the cool thing, too, is I figure with this toolkit thing, I'm going to have to come up with some meta tools just to come up with things to determine what we're going to do. So if you're here now and you intend on being in the stream tomorrow, which should be during the day, we should be back to the more or less regular time, I believe. Ryland, I think I thought I set you up. Rylan, did you check your emails? Because I did go through and approve you, so you should try logging in or going back.
I think it might work because I did go and I found your because the thing is with the forms right now, I just have it set up that I have to go through and approve. So I DND approve you, Roland, so go check it out. But if not all right, I hear you. Magic item. I'll note that. So we have game trail, footpath, cart track, or road. I feel like we can again use the same status condition. I mean, obviously destroyed for a path trace.
Ruined. Oh, I didn't know that. That's cool. I don't know what I'm really doing, but I like it. Overgrown decrepit. Decrepit might be need of repair. Good repair and then proceeds. I like magic items that use tables such as wild magic, changing damage types, producing a random item each day.
The Rod of Wonder is one of their faves. Interesting. I don't know. The Rod of Wonder. Yeah, that stuff is cool. I tend not to go super. I like kind of situational niche objects. But we'll have to figure out we'll have to vote tomorrow.
We'll have to set up something or I'll do it in the stream. I need to figure out some stream tools for things like polls and things like that. I don't think my app here that I use for multi streaming has like a real poll kind of functionality. I don't think I'll have to check into it because it'd be cool to do some things like set up and I think Twitch has that stuff, but nobody's on Twitch. So it doesn't help me at all because it'd be cool to get some things going with folks in here in terms of what when we get into the get nitty gritty. Because just a magic item is just huge. So it's kind of like what? So I would say if you're in here now and you tend to join tomorrow, think about what kind of magic item we should do. A weapon, a shield, a piece of armor, OSR, a ring or something weird.
Should I roll tables to come up with just a weird thing? I mean, that's fun too. Maybe we should do that. Okay, so we've got monuments we need to fix if we're going to do something or if we're just going to kill it. Structures, sites I'm happy with in terms of the options that we have. Paths, we've got four. I don't know if we need other ones, but I feel like that kind of covers it, right? A game trail, a footpath, a cart track or a road. I think that's so activity sites, these would be things like Battle battle or Kill site A campsite. And I don't know.
I will say minor, right? If a major layer is your sort of secret thing, then kind of a minor layer would be your is there anything else? What kind of other do we have any other activity sites? A feeding feeding grounds. Ground. Okay, so we got a Battle of Kill site a campsite, a minor layer, nest, feeding ground. Age, ancient, old, recent says we should do a thing where people from the community submit a magic item they use in their game and you talk about them on a Friday stream. I would love that stuff. Not nothing. I've been begging, pleading for folks to send me stuff because I would much rather I mean, look, I love the folks on Reddit. Reddit's actually been I know people have a lot of bad experiences reddit, but honestly, in the small communities that I go to, I really don't have too much bad things to say about Reddit.
But I would much rather talk about stuff and discuss stuff that you guys do than randos on Reddit. So I always beg and plead for folks to send me stuff, but nobody ever does or very rarely. So I have no choice, but yes, please. Okay, so we're getting like a little so you can see here it's kind of built up in a mind map, but you can see how these would become sort of tables, right? So I'll have a table of kind of status or condition table of age. And I can just have these two tables and I can reference them in different ways. If it's a structure, I can check what the status is. Then also how old it is. If it's an activity site.
Well, how old is it? Activity site. I suppose I could also do the status or condition, but probably the age is either a campsite being destroyed or traced. It's more probably a function of age. So I don't think I need age so much as I just or I don't need the condition so much as the age, but it's there. And then these other ones you might need. I might want to know two things. Now we got magic sites. So these are things like planar portal, magic pool.
Let's see. I have a thing I'm going to send maybe once. Oh, nice sandbox toolkit. Awesome. Ryland, I don't have a discord right now. The forms is it I might do a discord. I put up a poll ages ago whether folks want a discord. And it was kind of I don't say ambivalent, but it was sort of split.
I suppose I should do one because there are lots of integrations with different services and things that go like, link with discord and I don't have one. But I'm also cognizant of people having just crap tons of discords and why do you need one more? But I probably will do it sooner rather than later. Just to have it? Yes, to discord. All right. I guess that just seems like the thing to have. Right? I know lots of people have discord and then there are other people who just hate discord. But again, I've got the forms. I feel like between the forms and discord and I got patreon also.
And I'm trying to do better. For a long time, I just didn't really post much the patreon. Sometimes I post things for members, but I wasn't posting like daily stuff. I'm trying to do better with that now, posting the stuff I'm doing every day. So if people do go to the patreon, it doesn't look like I do nothing and I'm never sure if the people get that. Okay, well, I haven't posted updates on patreon I'm doing, but if you're coming from YouTube, hopefully you see that I'm doing stuff just about every day. But I'm starting to post up there again. But like everything discord is probably I need to add it in into the toolbox.
Yeah, it is easier than juggling dozen form accounts. The problem I have with discord is I don't like the layout. I mean, I know they're trying to get better, right? But I kind of feel like Discord is going to be if they're not already running into the same problem that Slack had. If you remember back in the day when Slack was new DND it was only beginning to be really a corporate tool. It was trying to do a bunch of stuff that it wasn't really built to do. And then Discord came out and Discord was built more to do the things that people were using Slack for, but it was built to do it. But I think with a lot of the way discussions are, I don't think Slack is the best layout. I mean, I don't think Discord or Slack are the best ways to lay it out.
And I really like forums for that. Maybe I'm just old school. I think forum kind of the way threading and everything works in forums is much better organizationally. I also like that it's much easier to search through stuff and there's more of a permanence if something were to happen to Discord, like all that stuff's just gone. It's kind of like Google Plus, right? Google plus. Something happens, it's gone. My forms, it's mine. If something happens to me, yeah, it might be gone, but it'll be up to me.
It won't be. Something happens with Discord or something happens to me on Discord and suddenly my Discord instance is just blipped off the face of the earth and it's gone, right? I think there's a place for both and maybe that's just what I got to look at is like, yeah, I'm going to have both. And then people can use the one that's worth use the interface of the tool that works best for them. It is a little bit more work for me unless I can find some nice automations because I tend to have to hand I got to post it here and then post to here, then post to here, and I got to do all that myself. It doesn't take a ton of extra time, but it does take extra time. And I've forgotten sometimes I've forgotten to post something on my forms. Oh, I did the stream on YouTube. I remember something like Friday and Monday.
I'm like, oh, jeez, I never posted the form. Or oh, I posted here and I forgot to post it over there. I'd like some more tools to come out to help automate. Maybe they are already existing. Or bots. I guess you could use a bot on Discord, probably to pull things off an RSS feed. Oh, and this thing hits YouTube, then run it through here. DND do that, right.
But I'll do it. I think not everybody wants to do it, but then again, not everybody. You don't have to come to Discord if you don't want it. And I have Discord on all my things, so it's a good way to get a hold of me. So I'll put it together. I shall put it together. All right, what are we doing? How are we doing on time? Coming towards the end? Yes. I have if this and that.
I'm actually like, grandfathered into one of their original plans because I was an early adopter of if this, then that ages ago. I actually want to check out their AI tools because I think they have some AI tools that might be nifty to use since everyone's getting into AI tools and chat GPT stuff. But yeah, there probably are some ways I could connect things together like that. This is true. Yeah, I'll look into it. I'll look into it. Let's see. All right, so I need what other magic sites you got? A magic pool, magic planar portal.
A magic pool. What else? Kind of magicky stuff? What's the word? I was going to look for a lot, not like a lay line, but like a well, I suppose I could have I'll put in quotes, like a lay line or sort of, I guess like a magic hotspot. Any you've got? I'll take any to Dos. I'm not the most organized person. It probably comes through. So anything you got, I'm happy to take advice on. I am finally going to be kind of relaunching my website, so that will be fun. Soon I kind of got to backport a bunch of it's.
Mostly going to have my YouTube videos and things on there. But it's probably going to be it's probably going to be where I'm going to social media links are going to link people to the website. But I want to backport I have a ton of videos. How many videos have I got now? I think hold on a minute, let me scroll over here. I am sitting on and granted, some of these are shorts. Some of these are shorts. So it's not an exact thing I want to say. I've got no, that says 482, but I don't think that's right.
Hold on a minute. What is it? I don't think that's correct. Can't see. How many videos do I have? Not a good way to see, actually. Oh, no, I don't. I know, I can't tell. Let's see if I go to hold on a minute. I know this is riveting as you guys can't see what I'm seeing, but hold on a second.
Okay. I'm hitting lifetime. All right, 400 DND, 40 live streams, 324 videos. So I am at 764, not including shorts. So I don't know how I'm going to get I'd love to get it all on there. Oh, topics for shows would be fine, too. I'll take anything. I'll take it all.
I actually have a feedback, which I think I've been putting. I have a feedback thing. I think you need to log in. Also feedback. Hexpress yeah, here we go. Plug this in the chat here. Feedback. Hex press go there, add stuff, anything and everything.
So I have like 700, 700 plus videos of various kinds and I'd love to backfill them all eventually, but that's, you know, I do one a day. It'll take me two years. I mean, obviously I could do much more than one per day, but you get my drift. Balances are more used to casually sending a message with a file or image attached to a Discord or chat than making a forum post. I hear you. The one nice thing with form posts, and this is more important to me, maybe it's new. Is there's actually some discoverability there I don't think does discord get indexed by, like, Google and things? I don't know how that works, but it's nice to get some faction comes in. All right, now how we're talking? But I hear you, Ron.
Everyone's got different ways they like to do it. Like I said, I don't doubt that. I'm more used to forums because that's kind of how I came up. I mean, I enjoy discord. Nothing wrong with discord. I liked Slack back in the day. I like what discord I like what discord did too. But I also find that if I'm away from someone's discord or a discord for some length of time, I'm not scrolling back up through all the stream, the never ending stream of stuff.
I just miss it all. People might have awesome conversations, but I wasn't there for it. I'm not scrolling up, but in a forum, I'll go back and read through threads. I could pull them up, I can find it. Here's the topic with all that stuff, right? I think for this stuff, especially when I might want to reference it times six months from now, oh, what was that thing? Like, I can find it on a forum. Finding something I find the search on Reddit is not very helpful. OSR I feel like you get the phone book or it's hard to find stuff. I don't know.
I just don't find it very good. Whereas on a form, I feel like I can find what I want a lot more easily. And look, there is forms that are super ancient. Some of those odd the odd board on what pro board? 74 pro boards. Like odd 74, whatever pro boards. There's the Dragon's Foot and everything. And the fact is that those are withstood the test of time in terms of the Internet. I don't think you're going to get that with Discord.
Even if Discord is around in ten years, like, all that content that's on Discord, I don't know where it's going or how you're going to find it, but it ain't going to be easy, and that's a shame. Whereas those old forums, assuming that they're still running, they'll be there. Google is not indexed by our discord is not indexed by Google. Yeah, that's what I thought. Ingpen misses G plus. Yeah, g plus was fun. Kevin says Discord is IRC with emojis. Ronald thought that Reddit was a type of form.
It is a type of form. It is. But again, see the thing is that I'm running the server. So here's the thing, right? So discord, I can run an instance of Discord, but I don't have control of it. I can make myself a subreddit. Ultimately I don't have control of it. The forms are mine and mine alone. It's on a server that I pay for.
It's on an application that I have installed. It's mine. No one but me can take it from me. I'm not at the whims of reddit overlords deciding to do something funky or somebody. Whatever happening, it's like it's mine. It is mine and mine alone. Same thing with discord. If I run afoul of the discord gods, they can't take my form away from me.
It's mine. And then the other benefits being that it is searchable, it's indexable, someone can search on Google and find it and come to the forums and information we put there will be there and they can find it. Maybe years from now, assuming all is well with the world and everything's still kicking. Yes, discord is definitely where the engagement is at. There's no question about it. I've been trying to kind of get folks to come over the forums and it's been like a real struggle and I get it because discord is easy. Oh, here invite to my discord. I'm in and it is fun and it is more engaging.
I get it. It's more of the time. It's more like Twitter or something where assuming you have people on your discord that your conversation is totally going. But then I also have these thoughtful moments where I'm trying to find something specific and it's really hard to find this stuff on Discord. And the thing is too is even though you can have stuff like you can make those threaded conversations, people don't always use them or sometimes they'll use them for half of it. I have done that myself on a discord. I'm on with some of my friends where I'll try to set up a thread, then one of my friends will answer, but he'll answer outside the thread. So now, if someone were to come back and try to follow the conversation, it would be weird because half of it will be in one spot, half of it would be another.
In the moment, it doesn't really matter where we get it, but then later, I don't know. That's the thing is, for us, the discord is just of the moment. Right? The discord is just there for our momentary conversations. It's like we just had our own little private Twitter. We're just talking back and forth. It's just an in the moment chat. But I find for stuff like talking like this role playing stuff we're doing for myself, I want it to be something that has more permanence. It's just there in a way that's easier for folks to get a hold of, whether it's me or somebody else outside of the moment that it happens.
And so for me, discord, I know they'd like to said they've done stuff to kind of take steps to do that, but funky round. To get back to your point about Reddit, I actually haven't had a lot of bad experiences in Reddit. I think the more focused your subreddit community is, the better it can be. But it's free, you can set it up, you don't have to pay for it like I have to pay monies for the server. It's another one of those expenses I just have to kind of chalk up and eat myself at the moment. Maybe at some point the channel will become self sustaining in that way. It's not yet, but I do it because I want it reddit's free. But again, the Reddit overlords can come and just take it away whenever they want.
I've heard of just random weird bad things can happen with your Reddit community and sometimes you don't have much you can do about it. Yeah, F says that the discord is just not the place. Terrible for later searching and archival on the open internet. Yeah, exactly. And I definitely want the stuff that I do or we do together to have some kind of archival format, people can come and find it because I think a lot of stuff is it's kind of evergreen material. People are always going to be coming back to this stuff, right? If people are going to be doing if five years somebody's doing a hex crawl, this stuff we're doing here now or stuff we've done in the past, it's just as meaningful for them. And if it's on discord, it's like it's basically gone. We talked into the wind and whoever was there to hear it, heard it and now it's gone.
Which is fine for some things, but a lot of this stuff is like I want people to be able to find I want folks to find it. Let's see. I feel like I'm running out of steam here a little bit. I think we got a lot of good stuff here. Anyone have any questions? I feel like I was mostly just blathering and not by title. This is an AMA and I feel like I haven't answered many questions, many asks. So if you got any, maybe a call in ten minutes or so, 15 minutes. So give me your questions.
I need some more magic sites. Portal, a pool, a hotspot convergence. Supposed to put anti magic. Hey, I'm happy to shoot the breeze. Shooting the breeze is cool. But yeah, if you're going to publish that, definitely when you got it ready to publish, send it over. Oh, somebody asked me on Facebook whether I would look at and he wasn't asking for something that they were making, but just in general about OSR kickstarters. Oh, fairy ring, DND? Nothing.
Thank you. Magic waste zone. What would be a magic waste zone? I'll put fairy in caps, so I answered them privately, but. I guess in case anyone's wondering here, every once in a while someone will send me something on Kickstarter especially or more often since I'm on the comms list for the PAX stuff. So what happens is I can only theorize what happened or I can tell, I don't know exactly how it works, but I can tell you kind of the end result. So having gotten now the media badge at PAX a couple of times, I think probably just the first time you did it, you end up on a list so that people who are exhibitors you're on their sort of media list and they'll send you stuff and they'll send you stuff about what they're doing at PAX, right? Oh, we're going to be at PAX but they'll also just end up on their mailing list, which is fine. Oh, this is coming out. Once off through that, through some other things, folks will send me Kickstarter stuff.
In fact, I got one the other day. It seems super interesting, but I don't usually do much with that information. And the reason is that in my experience, which is not too broad in terms of covering Kickstarter stuff, is that when you see Kickstarter board games, like I go into YouTube and I watch I'm a big board game. Fan. So I'll watch a lot of videos, reviews, previews, play throughs of board games, and you'll see sponsored videos come up, I guess, or even unsponsored stuff where they're looking at a board game that is currently or about to be on Kickstarter. Generally they'll have a prototype and they're able to play through the prototype and they'll say some disclaimer saying, hey, this is all prototype stuff, subject to change. But here's kind of what the game is as it stands and they'll go through it in the role playing space. My experience for the most part has been that there is no prototype, or at least not a prototype that the creators willing to share and for someone like me to put out there.
So when folks will reach out to me with a Kickstarter, they're generally sending me like little media kit stuff like oh here's an image and here's our little blurb. It's one of those things. So firstly, it's just as a person, okay, I'm not someone's media arm, right, I get it, you want to spread out your Kickstarter but I need something. I mean ideally I'd say send me some, I'm happy to make a sponsored video. But no, I mean even if I was going to do a sponsored video, if someone said todd, we will sponsor you, I would still say I need something. I need something more than immediate kit. Like give me a chapter, give me a sample. Like right, shadow Dark is not the only one.
But Errant was like this too, right? They had kind of a beta set of rules, an SRD kind of thing that they had where you could read through the rule and, hey, this is Shadow Dark's quick play thing, or this is their core rules or whatever. This is their beta. Great. And I can look at that. And yeah, it's subject to change. And sure, Errant was the same way. Yeah, some of the stuff's going to change. I think the author of The Golden Age of I think Keras, who I looked at a while ago, like, their thing is now coming into production.
And they're like, hey, it's up on drive through now. And I was like, oh, awesome. It's like, how much has changed since the copy that I looked at? And he was like, A lot. I was like, great. I'd love to take another look at it when it's kind of all out there. But for the most part with the RPG stuff, it's not in any kind of finished state. And so I'm not trying to do that. DND I think at one point here's the thing.
The only thing I ask for if I reach out to somebody is I just ask for the material. Can you send me the thing? If you can send to me physically, that's awesome. If you can send to me digitally, that's fine, but I need the thing. Maybe at some point I'll get to be like, well, yes, whatever, but I'll look at this. But I'm not going to present to you guys just some media kit fluff. I need a little substance before I'm going to check it out so I don't end up covering a lot of Kickstarter stuff. And the other thing is too, and this is just I think if folks who have been on this channel with me for a while will notice, I'm oftentimes oblivious to what's happening. I mean, I miss Shadow Dark until way late.
Someone's like oh, hey, you heard this thing. Shadow dark. I'm like, no. So it's only been making almost a million dollars in saying, maybe you should go check it out. It's like oh, yeah. Cool. I guess I say all that to say, if you're wondering why I don't look at you don't see much stuff that's in Kickstarter. It's either, one, I haven't heard of it because I just missed it.
Or two, they just don't have anything of substance for me to look at. If I do see something that seems interesting, I will often try to reach out. And sometimes I don't hear anything back, which is fine. Sometimes I hear back that they don't have anything, and I just say, okay, well, if you do, or when you do, send it to me. But I'm not just going to advertise somebody's Kickstarter. That's the other thing. Someone will send me something like, oh, we'd love it if you signal boosted our Kickstarter. It's like, but I don't know you're.
What? You're asking me to just kind of blindly signal boost you, and I don't know who you are. I don't know what your thing is, if it's somebody I knew, maybe it's like, okay, it's Daniel or it's Terrence. Somebody like some experience. Like, yeah, sure, I'll signal boost it because I have faith in you, because you're my friend and hopefully you wouldn't try to use me for some kind of Mel Brooks's producers like scheme. But other than that, it's like, I'm not just going to retweet it, essentially, or put it out there. Like, I somehow endorse this thing that all I see is a couple of images and a poll quote. So if you are interested because I know there are other creators, it's one of these weird things. Look, I'm blessed for each and every subscriber and folks who follow me, but I feel like for the number of subscribers I have, which in the YouTube universe is like zero, if you were to chart, folks are the most and then folks like me and Les, we're like on the zero line.
Other people are a little blip. A lot of times I'll reach out to creators, they're like, oh, I love your channel, OSR. I see your stuff. And that's always like, oh, it's so sweet to say so. If you're out there and you're a creator and you're wondering, hey, would you you would like me to look at it? I'm happy to. I'm not big enough in my bridges yet to start charging monies to look at it. But what I ask is that you have something to send me, something that I can share with folks. If you just got a picture, some kind of concept art that may or may not end up in the finished product, DND a little paragraph, then just hold off on me.
Wait till you got things finished, DND then send it to me. Because I'm almost always happy to apply. I'm pretty much always happy to oblige. At this point, I'm not that busy. I don't have people knocking down my door. But I need something. He needs something. Hey, DIRP.
Appreciate it. I'm glad you found the stuff useful. That's always I love to hear that just folks have found some use in all this prattle that I go on about. Sarah says discord is good for rapid fire brainstorming. It is indeed. Let's see nave two on my radar. Yeah, people have been telling me about it. I think I have nave one somewhere.
Nightbot snagged you? Yeah, I think I have nave somewhere. But yeah, it is I got to look at it again. I got to see if I have nave one. Maybe I'll reach out about nave two, though. I feel it's an interesting thing. Like I reached out to the shadow dark. I forget the lady's name, and she didn't reach back to me. And I'm not surprised she doesn't.
I have a feeling. Was it Ben Milton? Right? Is it am I confusing people? Who does questing. Beast. Right. I think that does Nave, I hope. I feel like there's a certain point where there's just no, they don't need me. I mean, I'm small fry anyway, DND. They don't need me.
Because I feel like the reason why someone would send me something is they kind of want a signal, right? You want a signal boosted and you take this chance that it's decent enough quality that you're not going to send it to a streamer, who's going to pan it live so that you'll end up getting it. But I don't feel like someone like them that they need it because their own built in audience is way bigger than my built in audience. Okay. So I was right about Ben Mills. Yeah. But I am interested in it and I know it's going to be one of those the landscape of the kind of big OSR games is going to be interesting. You got Ose, you got Shadow Dark now and then. I don't know, what would number three be? I mean, a lot of folks did end up backing swords and wizardry.
It's going to be interesting, the landscape, I guess. So we'll see if I'm not able to get one, sort of. And I don't know what the process is or where they are in terms of the content and stuff, so it might be a situation where, again, it's not ready. I know that a lot of folks are doing stuff where they're kind of drip feeding it out on their patreons and stuff, which is a great idea, but again, it probably limits their sort of desire to have somebody like me look at it, but yeah, I'm definitely interested in checking it out. I'm pretty sure I read Nave ages ago. Is Nave the one that was basically your equipment determines your your kind of your abilities. Am I remembering that correctly or am I thinking of something else? He has sent it other YouTube channels. Interesting.
Well, I'll reach out to him, the worst you can say is no or ignore me, which happens often enough anyway, so it doesn't bother me. And yeah, who knows, maybe I'll get lucky. Maybe I can get him on for an interview or something. I mean, I know he's on YouTube. Okay, so that is absolutely all right. Yeah. I think maybe the reason why I haven't stayed on top of Nave itself because I just don't love that, but maybe I'm just too old school. I totally get the push pull of sort of classes and limitations of classes.
So you think about kind of classless stuff, but I don't know if I love that. My guy, he has a sword, he's a swordsman. Puts the sword in the sheet, pulls out a wand. Now they're a magic user. I never played it too. Right. So I don't know, just conceptually, I just don't love it. But I haven't played it.
And I never would want to make any real determinant kind of statements without actually having played it because it might end up being a lot of fun and lots of people like it, so it probably is a lot of fun. But I think that's one of the things that I was always like I don't know if I love that so much, but I kind of always feel like in sort of archetypes in some ways, like archetype kind of playing right. I'm going to play a guy and I'm going to kind of figure out who they are and when the who they are can change like that, I think it kind of throws me off a bit. Actual play series idea activate. Yeah, that'll be good. Maybe we can do it. Terrence, did you guys ever do if you're still here, did you ever do any one shots of Nave? And if so, how did it go with your crew? Ages and ages ago, Terrence had me on for something and I keep forgetting what game we played, which speaks more to my memory. It was a fun game.
What was it? It wasn't I keep forgetting. And then Terrence has to keep reminding me what the game we played was, but it was definitely not named because we had classes and I played I can't remember what I played now. Oh, you played grave. I've heard about grave. Hey. RPG. Grandma. I've heard about grave.
Troika. I don't know why I can't remember that game. Troika was fun. Troika was fun. Where does Nave sit on the campaign versus sort of one shot, not necessarily specialty, but do people feel like Nave is kind of more campaigning or more one shoddy? Because I felt like Choika was more one shoddy. It just seemed to me or sort of short campaign, like Morgue Borge a bit sort of short campaign or short adventures as opposed to long for my feel from Troy. It doesn't mean that people didn't play things, but I don't know, I just felt like Troika, maybe, at least for me when I played, I was like, this is a lot of fun, but I don't know if I want to play like, my long campaign in this. I think I'd want to play it in kind of something fast paced, loosey goosey short.
And I think Borge kind of strikes a similar vibe with me. It's a totally different feel, but also that kind of like, I almost want something punchy DND, brutal and short. Not that people you can't play longer form campaigns, but just kind of where I felt the comfort with us. I wonder what is Nave in that same boat? Or is Naved more of Ready Steady for kind of long form playing? And I'm asking you guys because I don't know, nave has some good DM tools for content creation. Okay, cool. Good to know. Okay, so Nave is definitely campaigning because equipment is so important, you need to collect your gear before you can solve the problem. I see.
All right. And Terrence says that Nave could go either way, but it feels more like a dungeon length game. Interesting. You have to check it out. I'll have to check it out. I'll see. I'll send Ben Milton a message. I don't know what his social medias are, but I'll track him down, I'll send him a message, and then we'll see what happens.
Like I said, worst case scenario, just says nothing and that's fine. DND best case scenario, maybe I can either get a copy of something to look at or potentially get the man himself to quest some beasts. We'll see. I guess I'm going to wrap it up for the night. If anybody has anything. This is like a megastream. I should have started earlier. I should have started at seven.
Then I could have been, well, I had to eat dinner, so I guess I couldn't start seven. That would have been crazy talk. So what we did end up going DND I'm just going to go over this sort of in and again. If you got any last things, last things, feel free to post them. But just to because I know some folks have bopped in and out. I was looking at some tools for coming up with basically your hex contents. So a couple of things. This is predicated on a procedure for scouting.
Or you can call it reconnaissance, and this would be something that you do in a lot of folks using the term watch. You call it a wilderness turn, exploration turn, whatever you want to call it. This would be a specific action that you would take on your turn to recon within a hex. This is not something you're doing while you're marching. You are specifically holding off doing other things, at least as a group, to send someone. Send someone to scout. So it's not like, oh, scout while we move. No, this is like the classic.
And I think the example I used when I talked about this at the beginning of the stream was Fellowship of the Ring. When they're in Rivendell, the council sends out the Sons of Elrond to check all the passes and scout ahead. The fellowship doesn't set out until the scouts come back and then communicate to the fellowship the lay of the land, and then they figure their course. So you're not doing this while you're moving. This is action that you are taking. So given that it's an action, you're taking it thoughtfully and that you can do other things while whoever's scouting is scouting, but you're not moving and scouting at the same time, I want to make sure that you get something out of it. So the idea is you have a landmark, which is the most obvious thing in the hex. Then you have clues which are less obvious things, and those clues funnel you towards everything, kind of funnels towards the secret.
So if you look here, we got landmarks, clues, the secret. And then when you're scouting, essentially, I have it just right now as a flat die roll. If you roll well, you get one location. Or if you roll, the least amount you can get is one location. You might get two, you might get three. So assuming we have, let's say, one landmark, two clues in the secret, if you roll to three, you would get the landmark. And then the two clues, you don't jump. So the first thing you get is always a landmark.
If you get other things, you get one or more of the clues, and then finally you get the secret. And of course, this would stack so that if you scouted two turns in a row, first time you roll two, second time you roll one, you'd end up with three different things. You don't just keep finding the first thing over and over again. Eight hour streams on the weekends. I could see that. I could probably do that on the weekends, but I think I need to start more in the daylight hours. I do need rest. So we go from the landmarks, and I just came up with some ideas of what these would be.
Oh, I also talked about themes giving your regions or your hexes an alignment. And then you can also think of a theme. The themes right now, they're kind of clunky because there's a lot of overlap. It'll be like life. If you roll neutral for the alignment, it's just regular wilderness, right? But if you roll chaos or law, you can think about sort of in a theme that really layers on top of this. And the ones I have right now are life or death, holy or unholy, growth or decay, nature or abomination. And there's some overlap, but it's really just to give you a feel for when you're thinking about you have a hex of forest and you roll that, it's chaos and you roll that, it's unholy. So then it's just giving you ammunition for OOH.
Now we have this unholy forest, right? For landmarks, we got natural phenomena. A phenomenon, a boundary marker, a monument or memorial or a structure or site. Clues. We only DND a couple, but we could probably fill in more be things like a path, an activity site where something happened, a piece of evidence that could be like you find a backpack sitting on the floor of the forest, right? Something clue. And then secrets would be things like your major layers, your dungeons, a magic site, potentially. For natural phenomena, that would be something maybe like a hill or ravine or a lake or pond or a river or stream or a forest or swamp. It probably would depend probably it would depend on your terrain. So obviously, in a forest, the landmark wouldn't be more forest.
If it was a natural phenomenon, it would be something else. Unless it was a massive tree or something, right? The world trees here. So then that would qualify. So we could probably break these out on a terrain level, but right now I just have a single list your monuments. I was having trouble coming up with these. A memorial, a triumph, a religious marker or religious something. And then for structures OSR sites, we've got a hut, a homestead, a village or town, a city, a stronghold or tower or some kind of temple or religious complex. And then paths, game trail, a footpath, a car track or a road.
I decided to at first I had kind of ruin and things in these lists, but I decided to break it out into a subtable for conditions. So you could roll to see what condition the thing is in and it could be destroyed, or there's just a trace of it. It's ruined or it's overgrown. It's decrepit, or it's in need of repair, or it's in good repair, or it's pristine, which works for whether it's a monument, structure or site or a path. Activity sites could be a battle or kill site, a campsite, a minor layer or nest. OSR a feeding ground. I think that probably is a pretty good covering it. And then, of course, if you need to roll to see how old this thing is is it ancient, old, recent, or new? I think that is a pretty good spread.
And then for magic sites, we were looking at planar portals, magic ponds, magical hotspots or kind of lay lines, convergences, things like that. Antimagic fields or sort of I'm not sure in this case what a fairy circle would be, but while we left it so hopefully this was a worth one thing I was going to ask. So I've been doing these monthly. Would folks like me to do them more often? Let me know. Maybe I'll put it in the community channel. Maybe I'll ask folks would like these more often. OSR not I don't have a good sense of which things people really like to see and which they don't. So maybe I will just ask in a post or something.
DND folks can you folks can tell me because I'm happy to do all kinds of stuff. So for me it's not, you know, oh, it's a shame, or oh, I don't you know no, it's all it's all good. I enjoy all of it. So if folks would like more of these, I'm happy to do them. Solo play hex crawl. I will absolutely do one. I'll probably play a little bit more Dragonbane, and then I'll have to see what I want to do after Dragonbane. So maybe do another adventure of Dragonbane or I think I'm in the middle of one, so at least I'll finish the one I'm on and then we'll see.
The solo thing has been really interesting, and that's one of the reasons why I posted it to Daniel bandits keep about doing a conversation on the solo play because I know he does some solo stuff. And now I'm starting to do some solo stuff. I think it's going to be a lot about developing these other tools, these kind of system agnostic tools to use. DND I've been kind of fiddling with it. If you've watched any of those streams about like, well, how many questions should I ask and should I ask about these things or these things? Kind of coming up with some because part of my and maybe it's just me, sure, everyone places things differently is that I want to be kind of fair, right? Because it's easy to you can just ask tons of questions and there's no real guidance I've seen as to how many or the nature. So I think that coming up with some rules for me will help in terms of just getting into a nice flow, I guess, of all right, I got this many questions. I got this much and kind of working it or when things are falling outside of the structures of the actual game system, kind of what to do. So it's a little bit of a learning process for me, but I'm enjoying it.
DND I will definitely do more and I will definitely do a Hex crawl, probably sooner rather later. Mythic, I own Mythic, version one or whatever the earlier one is, first edition Mythic, and I did a video on it ages ago where I looked at that and also story cubes. So yes, I am familiar with Mythic. I haven't looked at version two yet. I will probably grab it. I actually like the tables that Dragonbane has. I could probably see pulling some of that stuff out, but I will check out version two of Mythic probably for once I finish up Dragon Bane and I'm trying to think and maybe I'll put up maybe that's another vote thing I'll put up for what game to play next after Dragonbane because I also have Alien. I have a bunch of free league stuff that I need to do and I have Alien.
DND twilight 2000 also has a solo that might be fun. And of course I can always do like a BX Ose type solo game. So a lot of fun stuff, a lot of fun stuff to do. Same concepts that are refined, nice refining is always good. So that is it for me, folks. Well, thanks everyone for hanging out. This has got to be one of the longer streams I've done certainly in quite a while, but it was good. I feel like we got a lot of work done, got to answer some questions, got to hang out and just shoot the breeze, as someone mentioned.
Have a great evening. If you could give a thumbs up on your way out, that'd be awesome. If you found yourself in here, you're not subscribe to the channel DND you feel like subscribing, that would also be awesome. Otherwise, have a great rest of your day night. Whenever you end up watching OSR, listening to this. And folks, wherever you are. Game on and I will talk to you later. Bye now.