I actually use something similar to your wilderness procedure for running one of my non-crawl exploration games! It’s a prewritten island adventure that I modified to use the procedure. A couple of things I did different was that one of the features of the adventure were monster-lairs that were placed around the island. I kept them and when I roll a random encounter I check to see if there is a monster lair nearby and if so they encounter the monster - if they kill it then I cross off the lair and that part of the island becomes a little safer for them to travel through (since I treat lair encounter rolls on the encounter table as nothing). The original adventure set it up so the lairs are basically clustered by type and since I heavily foreshadow, this had the (unintended) effect of making the characters very cautious when traveling through certain regions - like the feeling of dread is palpable. Just wish I could figure out how to replicate the effect in an actual horror scenario (well to be fair it is supposed to be a haunted and cursed island - so it is on theme).
I don’t call it out in my procedure (since that’s behind-the-scenes stuff, and this is part of the house rules document I provide to players), but random encounters are content generators. When I roll a lair encounter, I add that to the key for my hex map. This helps keep travel always interesting (because there’s always a chance you’ll discover something new). In theory, that’s in addition to having every hex keyed. In practice, keying my map is still a work in progress. I have most of the area around the NE peninsula keyed, but I got lazy due to the dungeoncrawl that broke out, so I lapsed on keying it regularly before getting back on it over the last few weeks.If I wanted to let PCs make a hex safer, I look at adding some kind of hex-clearing procedure. I’d probably make it VP-based. Every hex starts at 0 Safety Points (except for ones with existing settlements), and as you do things like clear lairs or institute patrols, the SP for the hex goes up. After some period (e.g., a week or a month), the SP would decay due to the encroachment of the wilds beyond your area. If you really wanted the area around your city to be very safe, you’d need to establish patrols and outposts in the frontier to ensure that was the case.
I always wanted to run an old school mega dungeon like this. Couldn’t get interested players though.
I use that procedure for any kind of dungeon. It just so happens we ended up in a megadungeon. It’s not a big one. There’s only five floors, but the second floor has multiple sub-floors, and one of those sub-floors has sub-floors. There are also a handful of factions, which my PCs have managed so far to avoid completely on accident.I can see the appeal. It gives you sort of street level view of life in the city. I kind of want to try it, though I would probably not actually run an urban crawl per se but rather a city based narrative adventure with urban crawl trappings - sort of like kingmaker but for a city.
There are a couple of things here. On one hand, I want to have a travel procedure for settlements because I want to reinforce an immersive style of play. Instead of just “you go to town and sell 37000 longswords you looted”, it’s the players describing how they load up their cart, travel the road into town, down past the enclaves and the warehouses to the crafting district where Hammer Joe makes shop, and how he looks up from his anvil to greet them, but his expression turns to dismay at the damage the PCs want to do to the town’s sword economy.The Alexandrian’s stuff is focused more about adding depth to your settlement. Essentially, the idea is you build your settlement out of layers. The specifics are a bit underdeveloped. My understanding is you have your gazetteer at the top, and a layer right below it of the default information people know. Below that, you have layers for the different factions, events, and threats. At the very bottom, you have a layer that represents hidden information. As the PCs engage with the settlement, you pull from different layers to create conflict and conspiracies and so on.
It’s pretty neat stuff, but I haven’t seen any good examples of it in practice. I’ve not had a lot of time to go into detail with the nearby settlement (Orctown), but it’s something I want to explore and try to find a way to organize in my notes. That way, once my PCs do start getting themselves involved in local politics (unintentionally or not), I’ve got a toolbox I can use to make cool stuff happen.
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