Sourdoughing: an addendum to part 1, part 2½, and square hexworld (completing the tower and moving for-/on-/outward)

(First part, second part, or the complete series.)

Addendum to last post

Yes, last time we built a wizard's tower - belonging to the strange Lard Lord - but I forgot the last step in the tower building - rolling for debt!

So here goes: 1 - Nothing to worry about, no debt here. The wizard found the tower and managed to overtake it by turning the previous owner (also a wizard) into a frog (put the frog at the top floor - it's alive and has allies looking for it)

Ok, exciting - a frog! Let's put it at the top floor, and update our list of things known about this wizard and tower (last two bullet items):

• The wizard communicates with sirens
• The wizard constructs golems using lard and tangled weed
  
• The wizard is in custody of a small child of non-human origin
• The wizard is neglecting a lot of simple house chores due to the child
• The wizard is a lousy carpenter (see: entrance)
• A nearby earthworm is selling phony potion recipes to the wizard, hoping to eradicate all birds from the area
• The wizard is nicknamed "the Lard Lord" behind her back, although no one dares to call her that
• The previous owner - another wizard - was turned into a frog and is currently at the top floor, unknowingly to the current owner

 

The previous owner; watching, waiting, catching flies

With that out of the way, let's move forward!

Part 2½: Radius of impact, or I Don't Know How To Write Part 3

I have no idea where we should go from here, but I'm guessing we should be developing the surrounding area around the tower, using the bullet point items above. But does that mean zooming out, placing the tower locally like in a hex, or should we just rip off some "fact" above and then connect the dots?

Hmm, what if you place these dots of interest in an area, and a dot of interest (the tower in this case) has something like a "radius of impact/influence". I'm not talking about "this is the Tower of McMeanie, and so everything in its radius of impact are MEAN", but more of a influential thing, like how it affects trade and people's views on other stuff. I like more the idea of for instance the people of a small village in the vicinity (radius) of an Evil Tower having to cope with that; "yes, that McMeanie is horrifying, but it could be worse, possibly; at least now I know what I got." Or stuff like superstition.

(And sometimes these Towers of McMeanies have a very small radius; they want to be left alone/occluded from the world. Or maybe no one really cares about that place anymore.)

So you could define these dots of interest, along with their radius of impact/influence, and just randomly plot them on a canvas/piece of cardboard/left side of a boar. You could then assign different properties (i.e. nouns/verbs) to these radii, like "superstitious", "xenophobia", "greed", "health", "oppressed", and so on (a radius of impact should probably hold multiple properties).

The intersection of multiple radii could lead to interesting splats of information on the world, that have shaped that particular place and people (if static). I guess the PCs themselves each carry a "spotlight", e.g. a radius of impact attributed with different properties - and that is something that ripples through these static radii of the world.

OK, enough of me just making things up, I think we need a silly image here that are somewhat related to my ramblings:

Should our newly constructed tower - the tower of the Lard Lord - have a radius of impact? Yes. Should we define it now? Maybe? How would one define such a radius?

Well, first of, the radius needs a value and a unit. Since the tower is fixed in place (OR IS IT???) we could just count the radius in meters, I guess. So how big should it be? Well, we could reiterate the bullet points above, and see if any of them gives us any indication of an increase in radius, and potentially what kind of property we should add to our circle (i.e. the Lard Lord communicates with sirens, so maybe people in the radius are always on the lookout towards to sky, or avoid the water ways, or dislikes ladies wearing fur, etc.).

I don't think I'll add a radius now, since our little sourdoughing world doesn't really consist of anything besides this.

Intermission: It Puts the Tower In the World, or I Can't Do Hexes In Google Sheets

I've been reading some good advice on hexcrawling lately, which is something I have no experience with, but the idea behind it speaks to me, so I think I'll just try to cram this into here as well.

With the little caveat that I can't do hexagons in Google. But it doesn't matter, since 1) I want to keep this simple, 2) I don't think it really matters actually.

So this is the known world of sourdoughing at the moment:

I made the "Lard Lord" into a link, that just opens the adjacent spreadsheet tab "Wizard's Tower - the Lard Lord" (which is the same sheet I've been posting previously). It just seems silly not to take advantage of those technical aids available here.

Alright, next time we'll move on to part 3, where we'll start fleshing out something else (hopefully! Or maybe I'll just do an infinity series of "Addendum to Part 2½" and we'll never leave this square hex).