Feb 17, 2012

What Can You See When You Look Around?

This is a dice map for when your PCs are riding across the Plains of Kadiz and they stop and suddenly say "What can we see around us?" This dice map answers that questions. You use it in the typical way, dropping a bunch of dice on it and seeing where they land. The map has a little arrow pointing north so you can orient where everything is, or you can just treat that as "ahead of the PCs" if you prefer. You can find the explanations of every landform and type on this dice map on Wikipedia.

Linear features like eskers, canyons, draws and rivers are extended in the directions that the hex segment is, so that esker in the bottom right corner of the dice map runs east-west.

The numbers on the dice for the hex segments convey magnitude. For linear features like eskers or scarp or canyons, treat it as the number of kilometres they extend. For things like meadows and boreal forest, it's the number of square kilometres it covers. For things like smoke or game or sinkholes, it's the number of those things that appear.

If a die comes up "1", then the terrain features it lands on are impassable, even if they're good ones like eskers, draws or meadows, and must be circumvented (requiring skill tests as the referee considers appropriate). Meadows in the Dawnlands catch fire pretty regularly, alvar may be too broken for horses or men to cross safely, the river can't be forded, the forest is too thick to get through, draws may be at risk of an avalanche, and eskers may be treacherous footing whipped by the wind, etc.

If the PCs aren't in any special kind of terrain, the most common kinds of terrain in the Dawnlands are polje and chalk heath.