Writing my Odd Game

Make your Crimson Rock

Fully functional pointcrawl map making.

CREATING YOUR ROCK.

The overland map and travel uses a Pointcrawl system. This means the planet offers no points of interest beyond those made by Bots (settlements) or the Departed (burrows). Between two locations, the relevant bits are only distance, terrain, and any other Bots and events.

Consider the following principles when using your Map:

MAKING YOUR REGION. For starting your map:

  1. Crimson Rock has many different regions. Roll on the Regions Table for some inspiration or decide your own.

  2. Place a settlement in the center. Consider the main faction on the Settlement and its happenings, or roll on the table.

Settlements keep tabs on its immediate surroundings and the general directions of other nearby settlements.

  1. Connect three to four burrows to it. Take note of each pathway and its Scrap cost to travel. See the Pathway Table.

Burrows usually clue to each other's directions, from cables, pointed antennas, pipelines, to aimed turrets, landmines and barbed wires and fences.

  1. Connect the neighboring locations, and add two to three extra locations around.

If a region has two or more settlements, they have to share (or dispute) the limited resources. Bots try to avoid this by keeping a distance when settling.

  1. Add two to three pathways to neighboring regions.

You don’t need to worry about those for now, just give them a name (or roll on the table), a general problem, and something the region needs. This will help you improvise Bots and foreshadow rumors from these distant lands.

This is your starting region, enough for a Short Story.

EXAMPLE - MAKING YOUR REGION

map

Let’s pick a region. We roll a 1 on the Regions Table, the Isolated Plateau.

Our settlement (S1) roll are 5 and 11, which give us Vigil archive-keepers and a recently overthrown leader. We are in the Plateau, so we will call it the Highest Eyes, with its recent command asking for any and all relics from the Creators to be brought back from all the burrows after a leadership that favored scavenging purely for survival.

Let’s connect B1, B2, B3 and B4 to it.

Then we will connect them with each other, add B5 as an extra, more distant burrow, and add S2, a second settlement (rolls 7 and 16), so a group of Dancer cult of the Dimming with pilgrims, which can be our expelled Vigils from S1. Let’s call it World’s Edge, as they are on the edge of the Plateau.

Let’s add two neighboring regions (20 and 15 on the rolls). The Meteor Graveyard may be suffering from a scrap shortage and in need of miners for opening paths to blocked burrows, and the Rockfall Coast may be facing a recent rockslide, looking for a permanent solution. We can bleed some of the Rockfall Coast culture into S2: refugees from the rockslide can also be present!

Let’s roll the initial pathways from Highest Eyes:

So Highest Eyes is under new management and looking to expand scavenging action, and World’s Edge needs a lot of resources by facing a serious overpopulation problem with refugees from two different locations. Maybe all the refugees need is a little push to move to Meteor Graveyard...