![]() ![]() As part of its efforts at realism, the game randomly generates a big world on as realistic lines as it can muster. What was germane to my mapmaking exercise was Dwarf Fortress’ world generation. It’s been in alpha for 16 years and will never hit a release candidate that also doesn’t matter. Your colony of dwarves loves, fights, starves, barfs, and dies (mostly dies) according to painstakingly accurate depictions of physics. The game’s premise is that of any other city builder, but the reality is that its creators aimed to make a hyper-realistic simulation of dwarf life. If you’re not familiar with it, Dwarf Fortress is a PC game which is, by turns, one of the most complicated games ever made and a work of outsider art. The answer came from an unlikely place: the now venerable (and free) Dwarf Fortress. Mountains, forests, and rivers behave certain ways in reality and getting those features correct on a fantasy map takes a lot of effort. In any event, making believable world maps is hard. I needed a sense of the unknown, where danger is around every corner, but I’m perpetually short of time, or bad at managing what I have, so sketching detailed maps was out of the question. I didn’t want to revisit familiar worlds like Greyhawk or the Forgotten Realms. I set about acquiring a big collection of dungeons, so that way I had things ready to go when my party searched a specific hex or lingered too long in a given town. I used Labyrinth Lord, a recut of the Moldvay Basic D&D set, and I wanted the campaign to be the groggiest of grognard: a massive hexcrawl, dotted with dungeons. A few years ago, I got the idea to do a truly old school Dungeons & Dragons game.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |