A monster on the verge of eating an adventurer.

#code

The Kraal

by Ramanan Sivaranjan on April 05, 2013

Tagged: osr homebrew code

Zak Smith was so happy with how his previous crowd sourced hex crawl went he decided to run another. This time I actually participated, offering up a few hex descriptions of my own. All told we had 66 people writing for the project. All the more interesting, this was all organized and run on Google+, the ghost-town social network.

This project seems perfectly suited for a crowd sourced effort. The little descriptions are quite varied and creative, and producing all of them happened quite quickly. I suspect if you asked a single person to write up 400 odd hex descriptions they’d fall into a certain amount of sameness pretty quickly. This is a common complain with Carcosa, for example. Taking a bunch of junk like this and cleaning up can also be a chore, but a few people offered to help and that made the process go much quicker and probably better than it would have had one person done the editing alone.

People also did a good job expanding on each others descriptions, making the area described feel alive. I mentioned early on that in Hex 0116 a group of spies were making their way to a city just North of that Hex. I mentioned they were from a far off city in a Hex that had yet to be described. Well before we got to point that city was fleshed out other people had written about the city.

The Kraal sounds like an interesting place to run an adventure. You should check it out.

Comments

The Hexenbracken

by Ramanan Sivaranjan on March 31, 2013

Tagged: osr homebrew code

Zak Smith (from D&D with Pornstars) took a hex map by Brendan from Untimately and asked people on G+ to fill it up with descriptions. Over the course of a few days he filled in the entire map with little descriptions.

Random Wizard took all the descriptions and put them up on Google Docs. I saved the Google Docs file as a CSV and wrote a Python script to spit out everything in a slightly nicer format. You can view the resulting web page over here: The Hexenbracken.

If you are a little bit tech savvy, you can edit the Google Doc as outlined in Zak’s post, and use the python script I wrote to create your own version of the site. You can also work with the CSV file in the repo directly.

In a follow up post about this project, Zak discusses how to run a ‘hexcrawl’.

This is some serious ass communal game development at its finest.

Comments