Session 14: Wandering and then Home

Continued From Session 13: Treasure Aplenty

Original Page

6-Mile Hexes north of Buda-Pest
Aerial view

Time to discuss the running of last Friday, August 7. Session 1 was February 6, so that's six months this has been ongoing. With the treasure in hand from the previous session, the players accepted the help of their centaur friends (having done them the "favour" of getting rid of the troglodytes) to have themselves led out of Bakony Sanjak and Ottoman-controlled Europe. They were left in the semi-wilderness just across the border.

At the same time, they had lost track of Barica and Kruno, the party's guides that were to take them to this blockhouse on the boundary of Croatia and the Ottomans… they went to "get food" and then disappeared. Augury, after some failed attempts, turned up the knowledge that they were "west of the party" and then, after a bit longer, that Kruno had died. What happened is not known. The party showed so much loyalty that they promptly gave up on the Croatian plan and began a'studyin' on what else they might want to do.

That's completely fair. I pulled them into the scheme openly, but then the journey across Bakony proved fraught with pursuit and the effacing of the Croatian pair's allies… while permitting the plundering of one baby dragon lair and then the trogylodytes. The original adventure was replaced by two others and the party felt, well, they didn't need to follow someone else's star. They took advantage of being in Burgenland and Hapsburg Hungary to get their friend Fenwick upgraded to a 1st level fighter and a few other things, because that's what mattered to them.

Fenwick had accumulated 1500 x.p. through combat, so that as a present soldier-at-arms, he was eligible for a "battlefield commission," 17th century D&D game style, as detailed by these rules. They did the training in Sopron south of Lake Neuseidler, while the party moved 12 miles further on to Eisenstadt, where they took advantage of a more rigorously commercial/guild settlement to get the things they wanted with their money. Ti picked up a 35 h.p. medium warhorse, Joey got some weapons recast with adamantium, Pandred trained to move his 9 points in falconry to 10. They had six weeks and they took four… and then they decided, urged to do so by yours truly, to check out those uninhabited islands in the lake.

Well, those islands with their massively high reeds had one catoblepas to be found there, not bothering anyone… and once the party understood what it was, without needing to make a saving throw, they were happy to beat a retreat… except for Ti, whom I'm beginning to think has a death wish. On this occasion, he achieved it: pursuing the catoblepas, he rolled initiative, lost… rolled a saving throw, failed it… and then was found by the players a little while later, quite dead. But my catoblepas rules are clear on the kind of dead Ti was (that is, "mostly dead"). A death's door spell restored him, I waved the system shock and life went on. The party left the lake and then, after managing their admistrative costs of hanging around Eisenstadt, they picked up a newly minted Fenwick (now a "follower" and not a hireling) and set off for Vienna.

That is, Vienna with it's 940,000 people and St. Stephen's cathedral, where the player character's were so gobsmacked, so enlightened, that they gained a 37% bonus to their gained experience points for the next two weeks (except for the cleric Zoltan, who did not attend this session). This, I remind the reader, is a one time only bonus per place, and does depend on the players actually achieving new experience, but nonetheless it is a very appetising motive for them to kill something, and soon.

But… that was not their priority, as it happened. If the Gentle Reader will look at this map, produced in March of 2024, it can be seen in the upper middle, north of Buda and Pest, a bright greenish-blue hex that is a type-5. There is one lonely little cart path going to it, and then there is a whole bunch of wilderness around it. The party has decided, THAT is home. And they spent the rest of their last running getting on a boat, calculating all their freight and taking a boat down to Sturovo (appearing this on this update of the 2024 map) from Vienna, disembarking at the last point of Hapsburg control on the Danube. I'll throw up a closer picture so the Reader can see the connection between Sturovo and the party's destination hex.

Following an unshown dirt road between Sturovo and the town of Bina, the players observed the market in the latter and spoke to the local guild, who would be happy to do any business with them if they want to smuggle fire opals or Tokay wine out of the Ottoman Empire. The party then headed off to Kubanovo, a little cottagecrafting village, where they got some information on the nature of banditry in the Borzhony mountains (both Turks and Hungarians act as bandits and smugglers, killing off each other in a continuous blood feud). They party continued onto the dirt road into the type-7 hex above Kubanovo and there the session ended.

So, an "accounting" session, with a little travel. It is, I believe, 10 days now since the party left Vienna… so unless they get a wandering monster in those wilds between where they are and the destination hex they're striving toward, the Vienna bonus is going to get lost. The players, no doubt, aren't worried. They expect me to come through, and I expect that too. I mean, heck, why not? This is a game, right?

At the moment, the party hasn't been very clear on what "home" means to them, nor should they be. They find something interesting about that isolated type-5 hex and, I must admit, it was a sort of unique happenstance that emerged from a meaningfully random distribution system for mapmaking. I've been messing around with the hex since the session and I know a great deal about it now… the players should not be disappointed. What I like is that I didn't need to "invent" an adventure… history, previous work done on worldbuilding demonstrated through the wiki, random die rolls for the monsters within (more or less exactly what Gygax envisioned in the DMG from 1979, but actually well done), has produced a real character for the 6.67 mile diameter hex (colloquially called a "6-mile hex").

I have created a map of "land hexes" for the area, which is a dead link on the Hex Group page I've linked. I can't show this map or talk about it, except to say the hexes are 1,302 yards wide; one 6-mile hex has nine land hexes side by side. There are 71 full land-hexes inside a 6-mile hex. I'm pleased to say most of these have enough detail to distinguish them from each other. I'm looking forward to creating the all wilderness hex to the "Lokos Valley" hex that is the player's desired future "home." That name comes from Chat, who after a few attempts gave me a name based upon an intermittent stream that rises in the hex. It is a part of the larger "Western Cserhát" that is the western part of Hungary's Cserhat hills, which today Chat argues is not part of the Visegrad Hills, which today it says is not where I've put them, which is just SO typical for Chat. Doesn't matter. In my world, I'll just designate the Cserhats as the western Visegrads, and Chat can eat my…

Apart from this, what I can do is show one last image. It occurred that since GoogleEarth offers a 3-D view of topography, that I could screencapture that topography, run it through chat's image generator and produce a sort of woodcut version of the players' first view of their "home hex" in their imagination. I've already posted that image on Discord for the players benefit, though technically they can't have seen it yet. I'll attach that image to this post also.

Continued on [[]]