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Monday, February 25, 2019

Carapace


In a fit of waning Google+ generosity, Goblin's Henchman sent me a copy of his zine-size adventure Carapace, available for free on drivethrurpg.

Carapace is an interesting product. The adventure (geared toward AD&D but usuable with any flavor), involving a giant ant-hill near a isolated town has no keyed locations. There is a brief bit of setup, covering not only the situation but what various parties in the community might want done, and what the consequences of the adventure might be. After that, there's section of on not one, but three different methods of procedurally generating the maze of tunnels and rooms in the colony: Pointcrawl, Labyrinth Move, and Hex-Flower. Read the Henchman's brief explanation of them here. Finally, there's a section on random encounters and random "dungeon dressing."

If you really dig new procedural approaches and procedural generation in general, this will definitely be your thing. Even if you are like me and this isn't generally your thing, the alien structure of an ant hill seems to me exactly the place where something like this might be useful. Not only would I run this, I may steal some of its techniques for use in other environments.

3 comments:

  1. I've been thinking a lot about Gamma World lately, for multiple reasons, and "carapace" was probably my single most favorite mutation in the 2E book...so much so that I've modeled it in multiple game designs over the years.

    Needless to say, when I read the title of your post I got a little excited.
    ; )

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  2. A bit of reskinning and this could go really well with Casey Garske's Stay Frosty game.

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