Wednesday, July 3, 2013

d30 Sandbox Companion Update

I know what you're thinking... "Between cranking out The Ogress of Anubis, putting the finishing touches on Valley of the Five Fires, and getting back on top of the Community Geomorph Project, there's no way this jackleg is working on the d30 Sandbox Companion."

NOT SO! In fact, I just finished the final "new" piece of content for the book (pictured below)—a chart to determine habitations by population density (I also used population density for the road encounters). The only things left to do are: 1) finish the Master Hex Mapping Key (the wilderness equivalent of the Master Dungeon Mapping Key), 2) refine a few of the tables to "enhance" usability (like the henchmen/hireling recruitment pages, and the weather generator pages), and 3) finish the "how to use this book" section.

You'd think the "how to use this book" section would be as easy as, "Roll 1d30 and index the result." But what Welbo and I are trying to do with it, is to (in a de facto way) show how the tables are ordered/used to coincide with the use of things like the Hex Crawl Worksheet, Settlement Worksheet, and NPC Record Sheet.

Right now, the target release date is mid-to-late August. Given we are where we are, that Valley of the Five Fires should be ready within days, and all Welbo and I should need are about 3-4 working sessions on the intro, I think that should be do-able.

I thank you all for your patience over the last year-and-a-half. But I think that you'll find the extra time and attention we've given this tome has been truly worth it. This 52-page beauty will not have a wasted page in it!

By the way, I think I know what the next d30 volume will be—but you'll have to wait until the d30 Sandbox Companion is out before I'll commit to it in writing.

3 comments:

  1. A nit to pick looking at this one, but table STT doesn't allow rolls. You'd want to say to pick the encounter from STT based on terrain or some such.

    Regardless, this looks to be the Kwisatz Haderach of hexcrawl supplements.

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  2. Thanks, Charles. And that's not a nit-pick. That's actually the stuff Welbo helps me with during the editing proofing stage, and I guarantee you (based on the d30 DM Companion editing work) that not only would he have called me on that one also, the two of us will most likely spend 10 minutes wording and rewording it to economize clarity and word count.

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  3. "Regardless, this looks to be the Kwisatz Haderach of hexcrawl supplements."

    QFT. Mid-August can't come soon enough.

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