Modular Danger Room

I love pictograms and symbols and trying to convey meaning in its simplest form.  And I always loved the idea of the danger room for heroes, because, well it's a lot like exploring a dungeon-- you don't know what to expect.  Also, you can play it solo.

I think Zak posted a random danger room generator in the last few months.  I know I made one for DC Heroes years ago, but I'd have to dig it out because I don't remember anything about that attempt.  Anyway, what if you took the hexagonal geomorphs I've been posting, throw in a plethora of cool hazard symbols:

and make a modular danger room:

This time when a trigger fires, heroes have a specific hazard to negotiate.  Lasers, poison gas, acid, magnetic fields.  I know it should probably be a bit more specific than the damaging energy type for the danger room hazard, but maybe you could devise symbols to represent turrets, walls, robots and the like.  Instead of treasure heroes might need to get flags or such.

Hexagonal Geomorph VI

Looks like some family visitors are going to postpone my screenprinting trials.  Frustrating, I'm afraid if I don't get this done in the next two weeks or so I might lay it by for a long time again (last time was two years).

Oh well, the good news is that all the planning and making these by hand made for churning digital versions out quite quickly.  I haven't even printed/cut/tested all these out yet.  Here are two more:

Which gets us to 12.  We have a funny shaped die to handle that.

One thing you might notice is that I am sticking to hexes that have to 3-6 sides used as viable exits.  This is for two reasons 1) aesthetically I didn't like the look of stranded island of dungeon, the little pockets that an unreachable one-side-accessible path would make, and 2) I was never able to figure out mathematically the increase in probability of ending the catacomb that each dead-end added to the tiles made, so I'm just going by intuiton here until I playtest these more to see how big a catacomb can get before you hit all deadends.

Another thought, I am torn between having a small set of pretty re-usable tiles and interesting, individualistic tiles.  For example tile 11 above could have a little room to the right instead of just the two loculi.

The problem is, the more unique you make one tile, the less useful it is a a generic part of a dungeon generator.  It becomes very recognizable instead of a something unknown to be explored.  I also have to remember these were meant to be used on the kitchen table, so you can't have too many.  Though, if you have a big selection you could choose your own "deck" before play, so to speak.

Hexagonal Geomorph V

These two are for Ohio Metal Militia.  It brings us to ten tiles which is quite convenient:

Hexagonal Geomorph IV

Okay, once I got more familiar with the program and got my layers all set up, the rest of the tiles rolled out pretty easily.  Here are tiles 4-8:

And here is a pdf with all 8 tiles if that's more convenient for you than fooling with the pngs.

My intent is to have 4 printed tiles with these on them back to back.  You can print them back to back for the same effect or just use a d8 to try them out.  You can use hex paper to record the catacomb you generate.  Just write Tile #, Face # with a little tick showing where the face connected.

I apologize if any of the triggers are wacky, I was just pulling these out of my derrière to get the prototype done.  I'd be happy to hear any feedback about how these work out for you, even if you ignore the whole trigger thing and just generate some catacombs.

Update: I fixed a couple little glitches.  And, you know what, here have the svgs too.  That way you can hide the layer with the triggers if they bug you or apply filters to make the walls more rough looking or whatever.

Update 2: Whoops, I had Tile 7 with a Even trigger and it has no even entrances. I fixed the png.   I'll have to fix that in the pdf later, I'm away from home now.

Hexagonal Geomorph III

Okay, I felt myself getting bogged down with trying to make the walls perfect, so I stopped that.  I went back to a more abstract, game-boardy look for now so I can just get enough done to play around with them (I know myself).

So, here is Tile 3:

and I redid the first two as well:

And here is a key to the trigger symbols:

Traps function like pits in old school D&D; 1-2 on a d6 and its triggered.  But the solo player can see them and decides whether to risk them.  Eventually I should make a little chart of trap type (didn't I do this in a post once?).

For the rest of the triggers, take the number of the face you exit a tile, and the number of the face you're entering and mash them together.  If that number is odd, the odd triggers fire, if it is something like 55, double triggers fire and double odd triggers.

Specials are rarer events, they might affect a whole tile like a cave in, or indicate that it's web-filled or something.  I will need to make a chart.   Actually, I eventually want specials to be unique tiles, like chapels, or large ponds or something.  But I mess with that only after I have enough standard tiles done.

Triggers only fire once, when you first enter a tile.  All triggers fire at once, so if you got two encounters . . . well, maybe they'll fight each other.  I know knowing where the treasure and monsters everywhere on the tile are is not realistic, but it seems the most streamlined way to do this so someone won't game the system.  I'm guessing you could easily graft on more complicated systems if you wanted.

Hexagonal Geomorph II

Here is another of the catacomb geomorphs.  I thickened the walls a bit.  I was initially thinking of keeping things as simple as possible and saving ink for those of you printing at home, but I added a gradient to try and give the solid stone some heft.   I don't know how this gradient will screenprint, I do have pretty fine screen.  I'll have to see. 

I don't know, looking at it as I post the pic, the gradient looks awful "computery," too clean and regular.  I wish I could get some kind of spatter going.  Why does it seem like this would be so much easier by hand?

Hexagonal Geomorph

I haven't been making as much progress as I wanted to.  Some bad news: somebody broke into my car and inexplicably stole my little screenprinting screen I made 2 years ago.  I was planning on making 2 bigger new screens anyway, but it would have been nice to have it to do little stuff and test things with.

Some good news: I just got three new ink colors in the mail yesterday.  Now I've got black and all 4 browns the company offers.

I have been trying to re-learn what I knew about Inkscape 2 years ago.  Spent several hours today.  Here is an idea of what I'm shooting for:

The grays will be a light brown, the blacks a dark brown, printed on canvas.  The game boardy spaces are meant to simplify movement for solo play.  I'm thinking 5' per space and per inch.  That would mean a 60' light source would just show you the tile-length as you enter it.

My question for you: do you like the way the walls look?  (I fractalized the lines and then distorted the result with "torn edge") I wonder if I should add some hatching.  I'm not really an artist and working with Inkscape is difficult for me, but I am determined to forge ahead.

Screenprinting

Looking back at a post I made almost two years ago now, I'm depressed at how little progress I've made.  In fact, I lost ground, because I'd made three svg geomorphs since that post that have been lost (the only reason I remembered making them was because I have printed hard copies).

I am determined to press forward. There are a few hurdles for screenprinting.  Getting the supplies is a piece of cake, they weren't all that expensive and they ship them right to you.  But there are other hurdles:

1. Darkroom
You have to have somewhere you can apply the photosensitive goop that makes the whole process work.  And be able to see to apply it, and not worry too much if you make a mess.  Last time I put a special bulb in a bathroom.

2. Water with Pressure
After exposing the goop to the sun you have to wash out the non-exposed goop.  You really need something like a pressure washer for this.  If you look at the picture from that old post you can see where I screwed up trying to brush out the goop (because all I had was a normal faucet and it wasn't cleaning the stuff too well).

3. Images
Yeah, common sense that you have to have some image(s) to screenprint.  But let me lay out a little what I want to do:

• I want hexes printed on both sides.  That means you need to make a rig that makes sure you are printing in the exact same spots on both sides.
• I want to print in two colors.  Another reason to need the rig above.  To do this I will need to make 4 passes at a particular piece of cloth.  It means I need to make sure I use a lot of layers when building my svgs, and once I decide which features will be in which color, it will require two separate transparencies printed out.
• I'm going to try to print 4 tiles at a time to make the process easier.  This means I need to get a bigger screen.  I may need to order another squeegee (I'll see if I can make the one I have work, it's about half the size of the four tile setup).

So, what to do about these hurdles?  I inherited a semi-broken netbook that I loaded Inkscape onto.  I am going to try and deal with #3 in the mountains.  It was 107 yesterday in the valley and I would rather be up where it's cool.  Once I get the images made I think the other hurdles will seem small.

I also made a little progress, in that 1) I decided my prototype set will consist of 8 back-to-back tiles and 2) I chose the designs of all 8 of those tiles.  Next I need to determine the encounter triggers for each tile which will be tricky.

Ok, enough blah blah blah, just wanted to let you know what I've been thinking about and struggling with lately.

Oh, and I am gathering material for a standing desk. I hope to enter the fall never having to slump in front of a computer again.  Stay in the shade!  I think it's going to be a hot one again today.

My Grand Project - Monsters

I'm still working all this stuff out, so it feels odd to share such an early draft of these ideas. But I thought I had better, because without sharing what I'm doing, it would be too easy to put it on the back burner again.

For monsters I envision using a deck of cards. I like the idea of the components necessary for play to be household objects that most people will likely have- six-siders, cards, been recently thinking about dominoes. Also, cards seem to be the component of choice for gaming and you can get decks printed relatively cheaply (my first impression after brief research, anyway).

So cards, but what kind? Doesn't that limit us to 52 monsters? Not necessarily. I love the idea of combining simple parts to derive complexity. So you have something like the hanging man in the Tarot which means something and Death, but when drawn together they have a different meaning. I envision something similar.

Perhaps on the first level of the catacomb, you will draw one card for a monster and thus can encounter 52 creatures. But on the second level, imagine when a monster is triggered you draw from the deck twice. The first card is the base monster, the second will modify the first. Let's say you draw Skeleton first, which means you'll have to deal with the ubiquitous bony undead, and the second card is Rat. Rat will have the connotation of horde, so it isn't just one skeleton but a whole bunch. If you had drawn the cards in the opposite order: Rat > Skeleton, well the Skeleton card's connotation is . . . well, skeletal. So that would indicate a Skeletal Rat.

If I can come up with 52 monsters that also have reasonable secondary connotations to modify their fellow cards, and if my math is correct, that means we've bumped the number of possible monsters from 52 to 2704. If exploration on a deeper level of the catacomb requires drawing additional cards, say 3, then you pop up the number of possible monsters to 140,608 (is that right!?).

Of course this entails choosing modifiers that can work together and base monsters that can be modified without twisting logic too much. And it entails base monsters that would easily be used as the modifiers, and doing all this without being too bland. Anyway, here are some modifiers from a list I made 11/27/99:

• Skeletal
• Zombie
• Spectral
• Ghost
• Wicker Effigy
• Stone
• Lame
• Blind
• Diseased
• Pair
• Pack
• Horde

As you can see, some modifiers weaken the base monster, it isn't all about threat inflation. Wouldn't it be cool to encounter a Blind Lich, or something? (well, okay, not a lich if I'm playing solo, but maybe a Blind Rat, haha).

Hmm, even as I write this I'm seeing problems. See, I envision the modifiers to have certain traits associated with them, the way skeletal things are typically considered to take half-damage from all but blunt weapons. But what then is a Skeletal Ghost Rat? If on the third level of the catacombs you draw three cards Rat > Skeleton > Ghost, Wouldn't any typical Ghost modifiers cancel out the skeletal ones, thus making them pointless? I'll have to ponder this.

Another problem: one way to use a deck is to have more cards of a certain type to make them more likely to be encountered. So for example you have 4 Rat cards and 1 Ghost card. Otherwise you have an equal chance of encountering annoyances and killers. So if I want to shape the probabilities of encounters at all, you can throw out the huge number of possible monsters to encounter above, they will be much smaller. Maybe that's okay, though, you don't need a hundred thousand monsters do you?

My Grand Project II

Here is a rough mock-up of how the hexes might work in play. You start at the red spot, maybe you've lowered yourself down a hole on a rope. Now, you can choose one of four directions to travel. You decide to head East. You reach the edge of the tile and need to determine what the next tile will be. So you roll 1d6 for which tile, and get a 2. Then you roll 1d6 for which side of tile two and roll 6. So you spin tile two around until the sixth side aligns with where you're at.

Now as you first enter this tile you take note of the numbers-- leaving side 2 to side 6 gives you 26. Uh oh, the first loculus has a symbol for monster and the "E" means any entrance to this tile with and even number triggers this monster. Your 26 being even, means you've got something to deal with. Maybe it's a skeleton, and you smash it with your trusty club. There is nothing more of note around so you need to decide which direction to go from here. You decide North West.

So, you go through the same process, roll a 3 and a 2 and plop tile three down with it's second side aligned with your passage. (If you had rolled a one here, this would be a dead end) So your number on entering the hex is 12. And that loculus to your left has a gold symbol that triggers on "Even." Sweet, you found some treasure. Maybe it is an ivory teetotum that you hastily put in your bag. You notice the other loculus on this tile only triggers on "Odd," so you dodged a possible encounter here, your 12 doesn't trigger it.

You only trigger the encounters on a tile once, backtracking or circling around doesn't do anything. But imagine, way back on your entry tile rather than heading East, you had decided to head North East. Follow the blue arrows. When you generate the next tile your roll of 3 and 3, results in an identical placement of the same tile. The catacomb map is essentially the same. But because your entry number is 13, odd, you trigger the monster but don't trigger the gold. That's Lady Luck for you.

So it is complicated to devise, but I think once you get it, it would be very quick to play.

There are many things I still need to work out. In making this mock-up, for example, I had to come up with a symbol to represent treasure. A dollar sign wouldn't be appropriate for my European friends. So I settled on Sol just now, but maybe there are better symbols. What about Events, like cave ins, how would you symbolize an event? Also, how many loculi do I want on each hex, how many would be too sterile, how many would be too cluttered?

Once I at least have a solid draft I'm satisfied with. I think it would be cool to implement some kind of website where people could upload their own tile designs. To let you all design tile "decks" to share with each other with CC licenses or something. It's all sort of a dream right now, but one can dream, no?

My Grand Project

I spent hours of my youth rolling up characters, wizards and gnomes and thieves. Oh, how I longed to play them through some dungeon or explore tangled woods. I never seemed to be able to find people similarly inclined. I tried the random dungeon charts in the back of the 1e DMG, but they were so random as to be nonsensical to me. I played through every solo module and gamebook I could find, which were nice, but once you run through them, then what?

So about ten years ago I sat down to methodically devise a way to play solo D&D.

I had found a design textbook in the boxes of my father's college books out in our backyard shed. I was intrigued by the way it talked about combining the functional features of a product and this was the biggest influence on this project.

I took stock of all the things you needed to determine in play, e.g. monsters, treasure, hazards, and the map itself. I decided the map could determine some of this. [I think I'll need to post separately on the many iterations of prototypes I made, I just want to get something posted today.]

I had several breakthroughs and many setbacks. But eventually, my system worked out to being a 1) Catacomb, because I felt the smaller, more windy features would be easier to create than a typical dungeon, at least at first, and 2) It would be hexagonal, the largest regular polygon you can tile with, but also easy to use with the most common of dice, the d6.

Yes, yes, you might be thinking, there have been hexagonal geomorph systems before (there must have been, but I don't know of any personally [well, except the brief mention in the Dungeoneer's Survival Guide]). But what I think is cool about my system and may be useful to others is the way the map helps generate encounters.


Here's how: On the geomorph (that seems to be the term people would most understand, but is it a trademark?) above is a loculus, a place in the catacomb wall where a body has been sealed. Well, it was sealed, but that was centuries ago, perhaps it's been broken open and a spider lairs there now, perhaps the skeletal remains of its occupant still clutch a glowing dagger. In all the loculi of these geomorphs will be a two symbol code, the second designating Monster, Treasure and, maybe, Event. The first symbol is the key, and determines the likelihood of the second of triggering.

In play, you'll randomly determine the next hex and its location. For now, let's say you'll roll two differently colored d6. The first will indicate which of the six available hexes to lay down, and the second die will tell you which face aligns with the passage you are in. Those faces will generate a two digit number.

Now, back to our loculus, the first symbol will refer to the two digit number that your entrance to the hex generated. This symbol could reference Odd/Even, Double, Odd Double/Even Double, or a Specific Number.

If we have two tiles with all six sides accessible, the odds for the above categories work out to 50%, 16.7%, 8.3%, and 2.7%. This gives me, as a designer, a range of probabilities for things to trigger. Each tile will have different triggers, and each time you enter the tiles you'll be coming from different directions, so it will be impossible to game them, knowing which tiles have better treasure etc. It will be largely random.

Now the problem comes in, when the tiles don't have all 6 sides accessible. My example above cannot be entered from side 6 or 4. So the chances of an Even triggering are down to 25%, and the chances of Odd are up to 75%. Doubles, Specific Numbers are all affected. It would be easier to make the tiles all accessible on all six sides, but that makes the catacomb infinite, and I don't think we want that.

So, what this means, is I have a lot of work to do, hand choosing the triggers for each tile so that they trigger in appropriate ratios. First I have to finish making the tiles. And I'm having a bear of a time learning to make SVGs with Inkscape. Each step leads to new revisions. I've just decided, for example, that the hexes will be 6' across and that I will hand draw gameboard-like squares in the passages as above.

I have always intended to give the whole set of these away once I'm done, as downloadable SVGs (so you can edit them and resize them to your heart's content), but I think it would be cool if I could make something I might be able to sell in addition. Don't get me wrong, I don't think there is even a tiny market for something like this. But I guess I'm thinking of the product I would want if I weren't making it myself. I'd like to offer that to people and be able to cover costs.

Anyway, printing these tiles on paper will work, but I think having them printed on something more sturdy and durable would be even cooler. To that end, I began learning how to screenprint this summer! Who would have thought that all my thinking on this project with a little boost of excitement from the OSR would end up in me learning a completely different craft!?

Still learning, but I did produce a prototype that let's me know that this is possible. I can actually do this.


Disregard the hex grid there, I just wanted to see how fine a line the screenprint could produce. Fine indeed, it turns out. Also, the blemishes there resulted from me brushing on the emulsifier when I shouldn't have, so it will look better next time.