Interesting Weird New World Review

Here.

Weird New World: Session 1 Notes

1. Buying and outfitting a ship takes a good bit of time.
2. I need mapping aids for the players and methods of communicating map features. I have what I think is a cool map, but it's not easily describable to the players, what with the irregular coastline, archipelagos, straits, etc.
3. In what is probably a related issue, I'm out of practice with the hexcrawl style, which wasn't helped by the fact that
4. I wasn't very well organized. I'm working from handwritten notes, preferring to play through things before typing them up. But in this case I had 3 different maps, 2 pages of weather notes, encounter tables, keeping track of the NPC names, plus the map key, all on different full-sized sheets of paper, all handwritten. Typed up, the weather and encounter tables will be on one sheet, which is most of the flipping around as the players travel.

It looks like the basic ideas of the adventure are solid, but it's the presentation that needs refining, and I hope to get that nailed down over the next couple of sessions. There are some important features in the adventure that everyone is still to discover, and I hope over the next two weeks those are all discovered to see how they work in play.

Weird New World: What Is It?

So I've taken the various notes I've put together for Weird New World and started to put together real work on them.

I realize I should just call it "The Empty Sandbox," but this is also coming around to being what I'd originally envisioned for the set's wilderness adventure but thought I'd abandoned. I thought at first to do a "beginner" wilderness adventure, and then thought to hell with it and just do a regular wilderness adventure.

But let's do some math:

I've put together a mapped area 60 x 84 hexes, each hex being 24 miles. It'll be a foldout a3 map (4x the size of the current releases).

Yes, 1440 x 2016 miles.

But I'm still hoping to keep the "adventure" down to 16 pages. May go up to 20 by the time I'm done.

So what I'm doing is putting together basically an open, empty wilderness area and showing how it is to be stocked. There will be a few detailed bits of course (including that one twist that people are either going to think is really clever, or really not notice as anything different in the first place I think), but for the most part... "Here's a map, here's how to deal with exploration and putting things in it."

... made simpler by the fact that this is all northern, even arctic, territory. So there's not very much there to begin with but hell and hardship. This is why I've been reading many books about those poor schmucks that were looking for the Northwest Passage for all those years (and they all failed and many of them died).

So while it may not be a "beginner's" wilderness adventure, it will be in many ways a tutorial and primer, old hat of course (but hopefully still good) for the veterans but just maybe a useful tool for those few new players who will pick this up.

At the same time I'm looking to see how I need to handle the maritime and ship exploring rules. I'm finally scouring all those links you guys posted a couple months back.

We'll see how this experiment goes. Hopefully well. :)