Whenever I write an adventure, I need to know how the players is going to interact with it.

Let’s take a Marching Order delve, for instance. For those who don’t know, it has some similarities to Choose Your Own Adventure books. Players interact with the adventure by moving along an ever branching decision tree.

Wants to steal the treasure chest? Go to passage 153.

The big issue with that organizational structure is it’s completely on rails. If the player wanted to pee on the treasure chest, and that’s not a listed option, they’re out of luck.

And that’s FINE for Marching Order. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but it’s not what I want to do if I’m writing for a traditional RPG.

Hex crawls and dungeon crawls are well established. I imagine, if you’re reading this, you know what they are. If not, give a quick google.

When writing an adventure with a dungeon or a hexmap, we have a good idea how the players will interact with it at the game table. What direction do you go next on the hex map? This is what you find. There’s a door to the north and to the east, which one do you choose?

I recently ran into this issue in my Snowflake dungeon/adventure. I found an area ( a collection of keyed locations)  and I’m not sure of what structure I want to use for it.

The overland map consists of nine locations – but three of them are listed as in Riverbend cemetery! I was thinking of going with the standard 6 mile hexes, which means it wouldn’t make sense to put the three cemetery locations into three different hexes. That also only leaves six non-cemetery wilderness locations.

That means I didn’t exactly hit it out of the park with my first iteration on this. The way I see it, this gives me two issues – one, how do players (and the GM) interact with and explore the cemetery? It won’t be a hexcrawl, but as it’s an above ground area, a dungeon doesn’t exactly make sense either.

One of these is easy – when I’m formatting all the entries, I’ll likely add a few to round out the overland map. Since the three cemetery ones will be their own thing, I’ll likely shoot for four more locations for a total of ten. The hex map itself will be around thirty eight hexes, so there’s something about every four hexes. That’s a good distribution.

That leaves us with the cemetery. I have this fantasy about a random table with gravestone inscriptions. This could work to actually provide some lore and rumors itself. I could make the whole cemetery table based. Search the cemetery for one hour and then roll on the table for what you find. The issue with this is you could repeat table rolls. I could fix that by keying the table to a deck of cards instead, but then we’re starting to get overly complicated.

The other issue is that there are only three cemetery locations. That’s not much of a table. So how would I use that tombstone inscription information I wanted to use in that table?

So here’s what I’m currently thinking – and I’ll be honest, me typing all this out is really akin to me thinking out loud. What if I made it a little point crawl?

The cemetery would consist of little wandering paths, which would give the possibility of random encounters. The paths would lead to little locations of interest, be it a group of headstones, or one of my keyed locations. I think I’d add another meaningful location or two, just to make it worthwhile, but not add different time keeping mechanics. Visiting the cemetery would just be included in the time it took to search the hex it’s in.

I’m going to give that a try. My other option is to actually make it like a dungeon with squares to mark distance, but I’m less interested in that method right now.

I’ll flesh out a few more locations, but it together, and see what I find out!