Great article, though having played a experimental wilderness play in the Adventurer Colonist King style, I can attest to some further difficulties for the player side. Many thankfully you've addressed here but let me go through my initial thoughts which may not pick at the matter well.
Dungeons are not just not deadly as wilderness, they are also concentrated treasure as you said but let me expand. A problem I ran into as a player is with wilderness play, after a few relatively easy lairs such as giant rats, animal lairs, etc, the treasure gained was not enough to bring characters high enough in level to continue engagement with other lairs as difficulty would spike, and across a party, would not last long enough to find further "Easy" lairs to continue growth. Thus the few very small dungeons I came across were a great boon as concentrated and fairly reliable sources of growth as compared to wilderness hex clearing, even with troops, scouting or anything along those lines.
Combine this with need of scouting, shares with mercenaries and expenses incurred due to need of increased material to range farther led to a very low cash reserve. Admittedly some of it may have been overspending and a mistiming of attempting to build up enough forces for domains at war but that'd be a prime concern for me with the above changes. By only decreasing deadliness you still have the problem of income flow.
Thats what I have on hand for thoughts for now, I'll see if revisiting tomorrow gives me any other thoughts to the concept.
I think one piece of that picture is that, in the wilderness moreso than in the dungeon, heist-type play becomes very viable. Low level adventurers can do a pretty good job of making distractions, getting someone in to steal some valuables, and getting away. Players trying more direct means can do well in the dungeon but I think have more trouble in the wilderness at early levels.
Probably the other side of that is target selection. Fantastic creatures are a prime choice, being often of bestial intelligence and usually quite high value targets. It may be quite tricky to steal a griffon egg or to bait a frost salamander away so its lair can be plundered, but if you can, it's worth enough to solidly make a level. Definitely very different from the steadier, more predictable looting of dungeons.
The groups I've seen be successful in the wilderness at low levels notably did so without a whole lot of mercenaries, waiting to acquire them until the early mid levels when they started looking towards domains.
This excellent writeup reflects a keen understanding of ACKS, functionally and aesthetically. When I built a campaign setting to demonstrate the principles behind ACKS, I had lots of thoughts along these same lines. Even though I tuned population assumptions downwards, the lands still presented as (relatively) highly civilized. The unassuming domain tables in the core book reflect the deep research done on ancient civilization; it really is an impressive feat. It shows both the power of distributions and the importance of designing with intent.
Great article. I agree with North-Scorpion's points from Aug 24. The big difficulty with hexcrawl games relative to dungeoncrawl games is that dungeons have clearly delineated difficulty curves which both player and judge can use and understand, and wilderness does not. Once you're past Borderlands, the difficulty curve is impossible to predict and may go vertical. My solution to that is to have lairs scale in size (and plunder) as you move outward, which adds complexity but not unmanageably so. I would also suggest that rather than cutting lair frequency by 83%, you could achieve similar results by dramatically rebalance the number of intelligent & organised lairs relative to animal & animalesque lairs. And as NS alluded to, hexcrawls entail much higher expenses than dungeoncrawls, so I am unconvinced that the rewards for hexcrawling need to be slashed quite as much as you argue.
With regards to increased numbers of settlers, they are important for two reasons: improving income, and 'promoting' out of wilderness. Crucial as income is, the latter is vastly more important to avoid being eaten alive by encounters. By the book in ACKS I, you need 2000(!) peasant families to promote. I suggest reducing that number dramatically; eg permitting a single hex domain to promote once it's reached max capacity of 125 families would cut that requirement by 83%. As a point of comparison, AD&D, whose wilderness-clearing endgame is well-attested, cut the domain's encounter checks from daily+weekly to weekly as soon as stronghold construction was complete (assuming regular patrols were maintained).
If you reach Borderlands status in a matter of weeks or months rather than years, you still face the challenge that you will be dramatically behind on income ergo campaign XP relative to your counterpart who took over a civilised domain, but you will be in a vastly more survivable situation, and better positioned to continue civilising the wilderness.
In terms of reaching Borderlands/Civilized status more quickly, ACKS II definitely makes it easier there by letting it improve when it hits 925 families with good morale, or 185 families with a minimum size Class IV market nearby. I'm not sure that's enough, but it definitely makes it easier.
I've also toyed with the idea to treat a Wilderness domain as Borderlands if it maintains an uninhabited but cleared and secured one hex perimeter as a buffer zone. That would minimally impact NPC domains (which have smallish strongholds), but be a great boon to a PC adventurer who's cleared a large dungeon to be his stronghold (and thus has considerably more stronghold value than is needed).
On your first point, I've experimented with scaling lairs as one goes further out, and I think it can probably be beneficial but has proved easy to overdo and create something overly homogenous without the difficulty spikes that make it interesting. There are more tools to level the playing field in the wilderness than in the dungeon, and it's likewise easier to avoid known dangerous areas, so if there is scaling it needs to be swingier.
Converting organized and monstrous lairs into animal lairs was part of my proposal, so perhaps I misunderstand you there, but any shift in that balance towards more animals results in a decrease in overall loot (because animals don't tend to have much, if any). This can be remedied in part by capture and sale of animals, or by animal-like monsters that do have loot, but ultimately if I'm running a hexcrawl I want players to explore a wide area so loot needs to be spread out enough to force that. Fine-tuning the specific loot density seems a good way to focus the game on your desired scale, so it's very possible we're just thinking on different general scopes for the region of interest.
>I've also toyed with the idea to treat a Wilderness domain as Borderlands if it maintains an uninhabited but cleared and secured one hex perimeter as a buffer zone.
I like this, it's similar to the AD&D method I alluded to above ("by patrolling the territory regularly...the character need only check once each week for incursions of wandering monsters"). It should definitely help give the domain founder some time and space to react to threats.
>I've experimented with scaling lairs as one goes further out, and I think it can probably be beneficial but has proved easy to overdo and create something overly homogenous
Interesting to hear, thank you. I swiped the idea from a PC game and have only begun to implement it into my home campaign. What about it do you think made things overly homogeneous?
>Converting organized and monstrous lairs into animal lairs was part of my proposal
The misunderstanding was mine. I thought you were only proposing a reduction in lair density without jiggering the lair type ratios. Concur that tuning loot densities is key to designing a region for this sort of game.
> What about it do you think made things overly homogeneous?
In the wilderness, there are more tools to level the playing field on tough encounters (mercs, evasion, long sightlines, etc.), fights are spaced out more (so adventurers usually have full resource loads), and it's easier to avoid known dangerous spots (because hex maps are open, while dungeon maps are closed). So at a baseline level, a "significant threat" can be considerably more powerful. Not taking that into account was part of my problem, because the monsters I included that could've ruled a low level dungeon were very winnable fights in the wilderness, and I've seen my players encounter the same dynamic when they were running games (notably including bands of frost giants, 8-12 HD dragons, groups of wyverns, etc. falling to 1st-3rd level parties).
So I think that if I was calibrating it, the "typical encounter" would be comparable to a dungeon, with a modestly larger number encountered. Meanwhile, the high end of encounters I think could be considerably higher than it would be in a dungeon, with no strong upper limit. Dungeon stocking tends to embrace a narrower range, so for wilderness I'd just be sure to keep a broad range of the possible even while the default gradually increases with "wilderness level."
Great article, though having played a experimental wilderness play in the Adventurer Colonist King style, I can attest to some further difficulties for the player side. Many thankfully you've addressed here but let me go through my initial thoughts which may not pick at the matter well.
Dungeons are not just not deadly as wilderness, they are also concentrated treasure as you said but let me expand. A problem I ran into as a player is with wilderness play, after a few relatively easy lairs such as giant rats, animal lairs, etc, the treasure gained was not enough to bring characters high enough in level to continue engagement with other lairs as difficulty would spike, and across a party, would not last long enough to find further "Easy" lairs to continue growth. Thus the few very small dungeons I came across were a great boon as concentrated and fairly reliable sources of growth as compared to wilderness hex clearing, even with troops, scouting or anything along those lines.
Combine this with need of scouting, shares with mercenaries and expenses incurred due to need of increased material to range farther led to a very low cash reserve. Admittedly some of it may have been overspending and a mistiming of attempting to build up enough forces for domains at war but that'd be a prime concern for me with the above changes. By only decreasing deadliness you still have the problem of income flow.
Thats what I have on hand for thoughts for now, I'll see if revisiting tomorrow gives me any other thoughts to the concept.
I think one piece of that picture is that, in the wilderness moreso than in the dungeon, heist-type play becomes very viable. Low level adventurers can do a pretty good job of making distractions, getting someone in to steal some valuables, and getting away. Players trying more direct means can do well in the dungeon but I think have more trouble in the wilderness at early levels.
Probably the other side of that is target selection. Fantastic creatures are a prime choice, being often of bestial intelligence and usually quite high value targets. It may be quite tricky to steal a griffon egg or to bait a frost salamander away so its lair can be plundered, but if you can, it's worth enough to solidly make a level. Definitely very different from the steadier, more predictable looting of dungeons.
The groups I've seen be successful in the wilderness at low levels notably did so without a whole lot of mercenaries, waiting to acquire them until the early mid levels when they started looking towards domains.
This excellent writeup reflects a keen understanding of ACKS, functionally and aesthetically. When I built a campaign setting to demonstrate the principles behind ACKS, I had lots of thoughts along these same lines. Even though I tuned population assumptions downwards, the lands still presented as (relatively) highly civilized. The unassuming domain tables in the core book reflect the deep research done on ancient civilization; it really is an impressive feat. It shows both the power of distributions and the importance of designing with intent.
Great article. I agree with North-Scorpion's points from Aug 24. The big difficulty with hexcrawl games relative to dungeoncrawl games is that dungeons have clearly delineated difficulty curves which both player and judge can use and understand, and wilderness does not. Once you're past Borderlands, the difficulty curve is impossible to predict and may go vertical. My solution to that is to have lairs scale in size (and plunder) as you move outward, which adds complexity but not unmanageably so. I would also suggest that rather than cutting lair frequency by 83%, you could achieve similar results by dramatically rebalance the number of intelligent & organised lairs relative to animal & animalesque lairs. And as NS alluded to, hexcrawls entail much higher expenses than dungeoncrawls, so I am unconvinced that the rewards for hexcrawling need to be slashed quite as much as you argue.
With regards to increased numbers of settlers, they are important for two reasons: improving income, and 'promoting' out of wilderness. Crucial as income is, the latter is vastly more important to avoid being eaten alive by encounters. By the book in ACKS I, you need 2000(!) peasant families to promote. I suggest reducing that number dramatically; eg permitting a single hex domain to promote once it's reached max capacity of 125 families would cut that requirement by 83%. As a point of comparison, AD&D, whose wilderness-clearing endgame is well-attested, cut the domain's encounter checks from daily+weekly to weekly as soon as stronghold construction was complete (assuming regular patrols were maintained).
If you reach Borderlands status in a matter of weeks or months rather than years, you still face the challenge that you will be dramatically behind on income ergo campaign XP relative to your counterpart who took over a civilised domain, but you will be in a vastly more survivable situation, and better positioned to continue civilising the wilderness.
In terms of reaching Borderlands/Civilized status more quickly, ACKS II definitely makes it easier there by letting it improve when it hits 925 families with good morale, or 185 families with a minimum size Class IV market nearby. I'm not sure that's enough, but it definitely makes it easier.
I've also toyed with the idea to treat a Wilderness domain as Borderlands if it maintains an uninhabited but cleared and secured one hex perimeter as a buffer zone. That would minimally impact NPC domains (which have smallish strongholds), but be a great boon to a PC adventurer who's cleared a large dungeon to be his stronghold (and thus has considerably more stronghold value than is needed).
On your first point, I've experimented with scaling lairs as one goes further out, and I think it can probably be beneficial but has proved easy to overdo and create something overly homogenous without the difficulty spikes that make it interesting. There are more tools to level the playing field in the wilderness than in the dungeon, and it's likewise easier to avoid known dangerous areas, so if there is scaling it needs to be swingier.
Converting organized and monstrous lairs into animal lairs was part of my proposal, so perhaps I misunderstand you there, but any shift in that balance towards more animals results in a decrease in overall loot (because animals don't tend to have much, if any). This can be remedied in part by capture and sale of animals, or by animal-like monsters that do have loot, but ultimately if I'm running a hexcrawl I want players to explore a wide area so loot needs to be spread out enough to force that. Fine-tuning the specific loot density seems a good way to focus the game on your desired scale, so it's very possible we're just thinking on different general scopes for the region of interest.
Glad to hear ACKS II makes promoting easier!
>I've also toyed with the idea to treat a Wilderness domain as Borderlands if it maintains an uninhabited but cleared and secured one hex perimeter as a buffer zone.
I like this, it's similar to the AD&D method I alluded to above ("by patrolling the territory regularly...the character need only check once each week for incursions of wandering monsters"). It should definitely help give the domain founder some time and space to react to threats.
>I've experimented with scaling lairs as one goes further out, and I think it can probably be beneficial but has proved easy to overdo and create something overly homogenous
Interesting to hear, thank you. I swiped the idea from a PC game and have only begun to implement it into my home campaign. What about it do you think made things overly homogeneous?
>Converting organized and monstrous lairs into animal lairs was part of my proposal
The misunderstanding was mine. I thought you were only proposing a reduction in lair density without jiggering the lair type ratios. Concur that tuning loot densities is key to designing a region for this sort of game.
> What about it do you think made things overly homogeneous?
In the wilderness, there are more tools to level the playing field on tough encounters (mercs, evasion, long sightlines, etc.), fights are spaced out more (so adventurers usually have full resource loads), and it's easier to avoid known dangerous spots (because hex maps are open, while dungeon maps are closed). So at a baseline level, a "significant threat" can be considerably more powerful. Not taking that into account was part of my problem, because the monsters I included that could've ruled a low level dungeon were very winnable fights in the wilderness, and I've seen my players encounter the same dynamic when they were running games (notably including bands of frost giants, 8-12 HD dragons, groups of wyverns, etc. falling to 1st-3rd level parties).
So I think that if I was calibrating it, the "typical encounter" would be comparable to a dungeon, with a modestly larger number encountered. Meanwhile, the high end of encounters I think could be considerably higher than it would be in a dungeon, with no strong upper limit. Dungeon stocking tends to embrace a narrower range, so for wilderness I'd just be sure to keep a broad range of the possible even while the default gradually increases with "wilderness level."