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View Full Version : Some musings on how to merge a hex crawl with a hard plot



Florian
2018-12-25, 05:22 PM
Evening folks.

Ok, first off, I know the Kingmaker AP inside and out, so I've a good example for how it is done there. Second, this is not for D&D/PF, but for a system with less powerful magical options, so I don't have to factor in stuff like teleportation.

Basic setup: The planet was used as a bio-weapon research and manufacturing plant in an ancient intergalactic civil war. The whole reason a weird bunch of monsters and monstrous races is running around, is that they all were purposefully bred for specific tasks, like serving as guard dogs or as "assault marines" on board of spacecraft.
So, naturally that went wrong and they created a race that was too dangerous for them to handle (think Alien), so the easy solution was to simple abandon the planet and act as nothing has happened. The ancient race was a master of nano technology and refined it to such a point that they saturated more or less all of their planets with general-purpose particles, you just need the right interface and codes to activate them for the desired effect (yeah, itīs tech-based magic)

The civil war saw both sides annihilated, time passed, other races started to colonize space, started empires and came upon their first nano-saturated planets, understood what they found there and the race was on to discover and colonize as many of them as possible.

The bioweapon planet saw a fleet battle between three different races and a lot of ships and escape pots had to crash land, essentially swapping out the three fleets, with no words about the forced colonization attempt reaching back to their empires. Again, time passed, a truth was struck and the survivors began to settle their region of the planet, diverging in different cultures and the tech level dropped more or less back to medieval times, because the more or less made the mistake to fall back to heavy use of nanos instead of trying to salvage enough to come up with production equipment and plants.

A side effect of the nano-saturation is that the particles need quite some time to recharge. Get more folks in an area and the availability of charged particles drop rapidly. So instead of real capital cities and centralized bureaucracy, you get a smattering of smaller, very decentralized communities and a lot of nomadic activity to always keep on the sustainable level of nano recharge times.

Result: Largely unexplored planet, extreme "frontier" feeling, the underground labs, moon laboratories, cloning chambers and nano generators have not been discovered.

Ok, as for the story part:

The moon is actually a massive laboratory, the stabilizers are failing, so the orbit is shifting, which will result in a rapid-onset ice age. Each winter will get longer and colder, which will affect food, naturally, but also the solar collectors and underground geothermal generators that recharge the nano-saturation. When winter will start to peak, "Magic" will also go down rapidly, which is a problem for cultures who have build anything on the backbone of that.

More pressing is the situation with the "Aliens". The ever-expanding Winter will drive them in ever greater masses towards the settled area, until their whole nation will uproot and start a full-scale invasion.

The third phase will be the realization that they have to get space-born again in some way, either to fix the situation with the moon, or evacuate the planet entirely when they canīt manage to drive back the "Aliens". Else, they will all perish.

Execution: Right now I'm thinking about the players being part of a multinational expedition force that are tasked to investigate the phenomenon of the rapid-onset ice age. I'm thinking about using a purpose-build hex map of the region, with the old installations and laboratories serving as some kind of dungeons to explore. Beyond that, all I can come up with right now is creating a larger and more sophisticated time table to simulate the effects of winter and the development of the invasion force.

Thoughts?