"A seafaring game inspired by mythic Greece, Pirates of the Caribbean, and Wind Waker set on the islands that remain after Poseidon sank a whole land beneath the waves." And thus was born the Sea of Helikades. That line, or something to that effect, is what I pitched to the players in my office D&D game. They were all aboard and I was left realizing that I now needed to build said mythic island chain and sunken land. I have no shortage of adventure modules and generators and plot ideas and encounters and all the rest lying around so I wasn't worried about being able to run it, but I wanted to actually build this setting instead of just linking adventures together and hand-waving a lot of the actual geography.
At some point in this thought process I decided to make my map with one of those big corporate presentation flip chart paper things that I've got for battlemaps. It's only a few hundred cells, right? It'll be fine.
The game itself is played during lunch hours, usually two times a week. I've gotten pretty good at keeping the pace moving (there've been times a lunch hour group has gotten more done in a hour than another has in a four-hour session), but I knew from past experience running Tomb of Annihilation in the same time format that a lot of play time can be lost in the mechanics of overland travel hex by hex and I wanted to avoid that. Point crawl seemed like the appropriate choice instead, especially since it meant I didn't need to worry too much about scale as I was drawing the map. Which I'm doing by hand.
The world map in Wind Waker was my main inspiration, a big grid crammed with mysterious islands and supernatural Happenings, and I've been trying to evoke it as I go.
Okay, cool, so, I need to fill up a 24*26 grid of islands, populate each one with gameplay, and do it in a time frame that lets me get enough done to be playable while the party goes through the opening adventure (a moderately revised version of N4 Treasure Hunt, with kuo-toa and Hades cultists replacing the goblins and orcs). I figured between Donjon, my collection of site-based adventure modules, and products like 1001 Interesting Islands (which has been hugely invaluable, check it out) I could get the bulk of the work done fast. Along the way I've been developing rules for procedurally generating this setting, rules that are the point of this series of blog posts. These posts are going to be as much dev log as anything else. At the end, I'll gather and summarize them all into a more quickly usable reference.
First step was tools. The aforementioned graph paper, and for tracking I'm using Campaign Logger and Google Sheets. Second step was actually populating the grid. I started by placing sites for all the adventures/locales I knew I wanted to use. I liberally pillaged old books and DTRPG/DMG products I've collected - Stormwrack, Ghosts of Saltmarsh, etc, and placed those on the map. Treasure Hunt went first since it's the campaign starter. Then Freeport a few squares away as I want that to be the hub for the game (at least to begin with). I looted a lot of sites from Storm King's Thunder and Tomb of Annihilation, too. Then I started randomly filling in squares, starting with the corner around Treasure Hunt and Freeport. The chart has gone through a few iterations so far, and this is the version I'm using as of this writing:
Square Contents:
d20 | Result
1-10 | Empty
11-15 | Island
16-17 | Hazard
18-19 | Weird
20 | Roll twice and combine
I started with a 50% chance of Island, but I found it was creating too dense a map - I'd like to have a bit more open sea. Up until now, I've been rolling d1001 on 1001 Interesting Islands and/or picking what seems best, but I'm now working on a set of island generation rules that I'll detail in the next post after I've used and tweaked them a bit.
You could easily ditch the "Empty" result entirely, or reduce to, say, 25%, and increase the others to match depending on the flavour you want. I think making variants of this table for theming sub-regions could be a useful thing when I get to turning these into a proper set of rules instead of a bunch of scribbles in my notebook.
Hazard:
d10 | Result
1 | Creature (1-humandoids, 2-monstrosity, 3-abberation, 4-beasts, 5-treasure, 6-undead)
2 | Reefs (roll for easy/medium/hard danger)
3 | Rocks (roll for easy/medium/hard navigation difficulty)
4 | Sargasso (roll for length of time to sail around - d10 * d6 hours)
5 | Powerful current (roll d8 for direction, 1 at the top, and roll d4 for strength)
6 | Maelstrom (roll for size, strength, and which plane any survivors are sent to)
7 | Sand bars (roll for navigation difficulty and detection difficulty)
8 | Cyclone/Waterspout/Sea Tornado (roll for speed, any ship caught in it suffers moderate damage and is deposited 1d3 squares away
9 | Undersea volcano (d100% chance to erupt every time this square is visited)
10 | Roll twice and combine
The results here assume you have a set of rules for ships and sailing.
Weird:
d6 | Result
1 | Creature Lair (1-monstrosity, 2-dragon, 3-giant, 4-beast, 5-aberration, 6-humanoid)
2 | Shipwreck (roll for treasure, and include a Creature result from the Hazard table
3 | Magical Storm (roll for magical type or effects, roll for permanent or periodic)
4 | Magical Fog (roll for magical type or effects, roll d6 * d6 for time to sail through, roll for permanent or periodic)
5 | Weirdness Zone (roll for which reality or plane is overlapping with this one, roll for chance to encounter weirdness)
6 | Ghost Ship (roll for frequency/conditions to meet, attitude)
I've cribbed a bunch of these results, for both Hazards and Weird, from Ghosts of Saltmarsh - hence the vagueness of some of the sub-rolls. Again, I want to create system-agnostic versions of these tables once I've got a world up and running.
Next time will be the island generation rules, and after that town generation. That might be the bulk of the rules, but I'll probably look at more tables for the weird stuff like ghost ships and demigods and horrible sea monsters with tragic backstories.
