Sexing Up Hexcrawl Terrain

Volturnus could have been a contender. Having recently reread that capstone series of Star Frontiers modules (lucky you, you can download it free and legally here), you can see the foundations of what could have been a truly great adventure series with heavy dollops of planetary romance, fun little mini-games (like a dino-riding polo match with tribal octo-critters), and a colorful, evocative wilderness hex map.

But the light-railroading and over-reliance on pre-planned encounters that lead you to meet Planet of Adventures-style each major sentient race on the planet sadly eclipse what could have been a truly great example of location-based hex-crawling love. (With some medium-exertion one could derail the whole series and revamp it, perhaps a post for another day.)

But hey, let's not beat a 30-plus year dead horse, there are some lessons that can be drawn out of the hexcrawling elements of those modules about gussing up your own wilderness adventures (a long running theme here on the blog). (Note I am leaving out pointcrawls for now mostly because there are some inherent fixes to these issues in that format.)

So what can we learn from Voturnus? Three lessons, I reckon:

1. Terrain should be more varied and sub-divided.

2. Terrain should be weirder and more wonderful (or at least interesting).

3. Landmarks and Specials should be more densely-encountered and varied.

Now click on this map here (also from the Star Frontiers site), zoom in and take a nice long gander at this map before diving in. Run your eye over the key and all those strange markings and lovely colored areas.

Ok let's scoot over to the analysis.

1. Varied and Sub-Varied Terrain. Volturnus is a large map hex-count wise but a not terribly large one scale wise. The hexes are 8 km (that's five of your earth miles). But what immediately jumps out at you is how much diversity there is in terrain. Not just in using a wide range of the major types--to hell with the tyranny of realistic bio-clime modeling—but in diversifying into sub-varieties.

So you don't just have one single mundane “mountains” you have mist-mountains, crystalline mountains, lizard head rock and soaring cliffs each that have differing horizon sight limits, movement rates and special features. You don't have plains you have glass shard plains, salt flats, rocky barrens etc.

2. Weird and Wonderful Terrain. You got a whiff with the list above, but a pulpy swords and planets modeled wilderness led to some great choices in that series.

See on Volturnous you don't just have easily-transversed blah woods, you have “bachanda forest” with dense thorn plants as undergrowth and giant massive-limbed trees as canopy roads. You have razor sharp “shard plains” rolled flat in weird-shaped avenues by steamroller-phant critters. You have baroomian dried canals running through miles of ruins ruins. Lands burning with pitch and oil-slicked lakes.

3. Dense and Varied Landmarks. The next thing that jumps out you is the large number of icons all over the map, many less than a day or two's walk from each other. There's something to travel to and have the party find interesting several times in a session.

You've got needle spires, mesas, weird trees, geysers, weird rock formations (four kinds even), elevation points, and other landmarks. You have vast lost city ruins, crystal stonehenges, ceremonial burial grounds, space pirate bases and alien artifacts. And in a lovely underworld turn, mammoth caves linked by miles of tunnel and underground rivers (marsh even).

This shit is good. There's no reason fantasy shouldn't also reach more beyond the mundane in this regards either. Dream big or go home.

All of this kind of design takes a little work, but has a big payout in my experience in breaking up the boredom of large stretches of terrain with easy to transmit and grok variation. Unwittingly and not always for the best of reasons, it's a route I stumbled into with the Feral Shore where the hex scale is even smaller--at two miles per hex--and wildly varied. Above is just a small, explored part of that map, you can see all three lessons at play.  

Hexcrawls vs Pointcrawls

Despite the header this is not a cage match between hexcrawls and pointcrawls. Pointcrawl reputation notwithstanding, I both love and use hex maps all the time in my campaign. Having run all kinds of wilderness in my campaign, I've started to become keenly aware of how each format complements certain types of outdoor gameplay.

Let's unpack the distinctions.

In a hexcrawl, the party is presented with a 360-degree, six-direction choice most every time it exits a hex. Terrain will often foster soft positive and negative natural choices, the presence of a road running into a different hex or a bordering “open” or “rough” hex (easy/quicker travel in a grasslands or what) codes incentivizes/deincentivizes choices.

The problem from a design perspective with that approach is this the “paradox of choice”, that lovely study that showed that an over-abundance of variables, tends to surprisingly reduce meaningful choice by causing option paralysis (that “fuck it, let's just do this” exasperation). And I believe that paradox often extends to the designer of the hexcrawl. I find making hex maps an incredibly quick (maybe too quick process) I think about the kinds of sub-regions I want, pop open hexographer and the map just flows out of geographic naturalism (or at least some kind of internal logic).

Unless you densely pack your hexes (I am insane about this) you end up with large amounts of empty hexes. Now you need pacing (and a sense of travel) and a principled sandbox GM just has to live with the fact that players may never see this or that thing you worked so hard to make, but it does mean at least for me that I can make some sub-optimal choices about placement.

A weird serendipity often hangs over the map when you start playing put these kinds of hexcrawls. The party runs this way and that way, sometimes running into a good run of interesting hexes, sometimes just somehow, inexplicably hitting the dullest string of hexes one could imagine.

A pointcrawl on the otherhand is all about the deliberate path choice of say a dungeon. You place a node much like a room with its doors and corridors leading out.

The drawbacks are much like that of dungeon design again. Make the decision choices too limited, too linear and/or too chokepointed and you end up straight-jacketing the players and making for a dull-ass map to explore.

Secondly it's also more challenging presenting an environment where wide-open wilderness exploration for its own sake is the goal. Sometimes you do want that 360-degree exploration/clearing or serendipity. Hexes give an exactness of space and have the advantage of being gridded with a recognizable number pattern. Being able to call a hex number is a convenient short-hand both for the GM during play and for players thinking about how to explore an outdoors area.

The punchline here is this...

I use a hex map when I want a campaign phase that...

1. mapping each hex on a blank map is a reward in itself.

2. clearing wilderness and creating your own hold is the goal.

3. is quick and dirty.

I use a pointcrawl when I want...

1. choice in travel and exploration to feel more deliberate and meaningful.

2. to highlight the major and minor sites in a wilderness as the major goals of exploration. (Revoca being an example of a pointcrawl hidden behind a hexmap).

3. well-thought-out, dense small sub-regions.

Oh and while I am on the subject, Luka (again for the umpteenth time in our collaboration) wowed me with this weekend with this beauty of a pointcrawl map for Misty Isles of the Eld. Maps can and should be beautiful also in themselves, no?

Do so click on me. 

Misadventure, Mishap and Exploration Challenges in D&D Wilderness

I knew the ladder was a Bad Idea. My fortysomething mind microcalculated risk and sagely pshawed it long before my ankle got caught between the doubled up last rungs.

But I had passed by earlier in my long meandering walk and it nagged at an earlier me, defying me to go up and see just what was on top of an aging, abandoned industrial block of a building. Anticlimax that's what. Four seconds of panic then a “hey idiot twist your leg” moment followed by a totally-not-worth-it pile of broken glass, a handful of steel vent ports and an obstructed view of asphalt wastes and new lofts.

Still I am glad I did it. I can even bend this back to elfgame relevance. But first some shaggy dog.

It's the summer of 1993. I, along with a gaggle of earnest, hoodied, patched and gamey-smelling anarcho-punk rawk kids, have been busy wearing out our welcome at a Madison coop house of earnest, bright-eyed local hippy-vegan kids. Aaron, a lanky (and yes gamey) buzz-headed kid from the Bay Area is holding court about the trains he hopped to get here: the long hours (days even) waiting in a yard for a "hot" express train, what kind of car makes a terribly uncomfortable ride, what it's like to get chased off by security (the “bulls”) etc. 

It's all misadventure, but I am instantly drawn in. We talk for a while and exchange piles of collage-suck xeroxed zines. His opens up a decade of doors for me. Between the shaggy dog stories of everyday life in the Bay Area hardcore scene and sweet, funny poems about Punk Rock Love, there were all kinds of misadventures filled with little mishaps. Long accounts of walking tours, most of it trespassing in abandoned industrial, almost all of that just about daylong adventures exploring the urban spaces that we most all just buzz on by.

I guess I gravitate naturally to that kind of exploration and the things that stick in my mind are always framed by some setback: the sapling breaking as I cross the creek, smashing the binding deep in the snow-covered woods on my crosscountry ski, lying in the keel of a boat retching with six-foot swells, watching half my backpacked in food for the week slide down a gorge, watching all my gear float down a creek suddenly engorged over night, running from a group of teens in the great hollow-shelled Detroit railroad hotel, running from security guards inside a shuttered factory, running from what I thought was a bear.

Me inside the Detroit Railroad Hotel circa 1997. 

Watching my dad fish out my brother who has been pulled under by the murderous current, losing my intertube with my dad and brother in a raging Kern river rapids and having to spend the afternoon climbing a mountain in shorts and cheap plastic flip-flops.

That last--which happened when I was still flush in my awkward, rpg-engrossed tween time--gets me to the relevant gaming-related point. I went home and wrote a version of what happened into a dungeon: a mile-wide underground river with some “come drown in me” boats and roaring rapids, whirlpools and secret caves. It was super crude mechanically and railroady but I remember having some kind of Shit that Can Go Wrong table. It probably was my first attempt to do real

Which leads me to my second punchline, maybe one thing that has made wilderness adventuring weak sauce in many D&D presentations is that it doesn't capture mishap well. I mean sure you have the usual beautiful organic misadventures of actual play. The “holy shit, I knew that scattering of bones and high smell of decay was a bad sign...why did we crawl in here” moments.

But generally outside of some mechanics for getting lost, food resource management and the one-off listing of things like rock falls on an encounter chart there isn't a lot of modeling of the horrible, funny things that happen that make the wilds and travel themselves such an adversary.

The closest I have seen to having a good, solid model of environmental challenge was the obscure Heart of the Sunken Lands put out by Midkemia way back when. Worked in there was a whole subsystem where the players had to deal with daily occurrences of such joys as horses going lame, jungle rot, spoiling food, etc.

I know, I know it's not rocket science figuring out these things. Maybe many of you have already homebrewed your own ways to do this (please, do share), read/adapted lifted something from other rpg products or think that it's just not a fun thing to throw into a game (maybe totally valid), but I kind of want to throw in more of that in my wilderness games. 

The wild places should have things, elements that are scarier than just the eight hit dice whozeewhatsee you run into. More ways to model hard gameable resource choices one has to make when an ankle turns, food is suddenly gone, blinding storms or the trail washed out. 

Yes please.

Small is Beautiful in the Sandbox

One of the most satisfying parts of being part of a hobbyist subculture that loves pulling up the hood and jawing at disturbing, perhaps commitable length about the various whirly bits is running into your own little epiphanies. Tuesday I slammed my laptop cover down and threw my triumphant fist in the air with a “fuccck yeah” with the last great push on the Misty Isles of the Eld manuscript (the second big stretch goal adventure coming out of the Slumbering Ursine Dunes project, Fever-Dreaming Marlinko being in lay out).

Later that night with the self-congratulation dying down it struck me that after laying down yet another small bounded 1-4 session wilderness area that the mini-sandbox has been my favorite way to game wilderness for a good long time. I mean thinking back to my beloved hoary TSR favorites Castle Amber, The Secret of Bone Hill, Keep, and that Gygax Lovecraftian temple one that I am suddenly too lazy to look up they all to a one have a small wilderness area (and often a small scale human civilization bit) as a short main exploration phase.

Somewhere horseshoe close to when D&D was born and the oil crisis was rearing its head, a collection of essays called Small is Beautiful became a public intellectual one-hit-wonder. Needling large-scale economies and political organization as being beyond a sustainable human scale.

Hey but fear not I come not to throw some politics or meaty real world thought in your face-- besides I'm still enough of an Old Leftist/Modernist reactionary to freakishly get a woody walking the grounds of the rusting hulk of a horizontally-integrated factory complex like the Ford Rouge—but to acknowledge there is something there there when it comes to designing to wilderness settings.

Insert your mileage disclaimer—by now we all know that people who talk in absolutes in a hobby environment are buttholes—but I think there really is something there in this area when it comes to sustaining a long campaign. Think of it this way, D&D is primarily a game where the main play experience is meticulously exploring highly-contained space. It doesn't have to be a dungeon but that classic format sure comes back over and over because it simply works

Wilderness hexcrawling has been there too as a suggested major play arena since the get go. OD&D has its random generators. B/X went even further presenting it as conceptually as a whole new campaign frame for when PCs hit mid-level. But from my experience there has always been something awkward and challenging about making all that wide yawning space notboring—and thus something you and the players will return to time and time again continuously.

I have been running the Feral Shore with its central hex-organized map as a major campaign phase now for a year and a half. But the actual thorough wilderness hexcrawl sessions have been a minority often a “we really need to get down to figuring out what is going on behind that ridgeline of the Domovoy villages” kind of impulse from the players. At most even when really player focused we have never done more than three such sessions in our weekly game in a row.

Invariably some other goal—exploring the smaller bounded area of say the Rusevin (a city ruins pointcrawl) or more prevalently a single-site or those beautifully eccentric player-driven quests (“shit really need to go find that Drinking Horn of Radegast to get those drained life levels back”)--pushes its way forward and becomes the main thing.

The hexcrawling in other words is more often a palate cleanser much like a one-off town adventure. Not consciously I believe that's how I prefer, short sprints of such activity around the main course. Maybe that's how it should be: better-designed wilderness should be small in frame and densely packed with sites. (Or maybe I am just rationalizing my own design choices with the Dunes as a small bounded mythical wilderness pointcrawl and the Misty Isles as a small bounded extra-planar pointcrawl?)

But back to you...

Is that the kind of thing you have experienced? Have you run—and enjoyed—long hexcrawl-centered campaigns or campaign phases? What made it different you think? What's your secret, bud? 

Reader Query: Random Solo Wilderness Generation?

Yesterday I got a compelling piece of post-necromancy, this time on my kickoff pointcrawl post. Zack asks:

“I happen to be interested in the hex crawl sort of gaming, particularly in a sandbox fashion. I also happen to be totally blind, so hex paper and so on isn't super helpful for me. In fact, maps in general are kind of a pain in the neck, because I can't read them easily, and I always feel like I'm missing setting info of one sort or another.
So I'm wondering if anybody has ideas for combining the point crawl approach, or one which avoids maps, with randomized terrain generation? I'd love to run something solo, like Scarlet Heroes from Sine Nomine, for instance, but they all seem to presume hexes. Another way to look at it would be an experience kind of like the Elder Scrolls video games, which I can't play. It could be a lot of work doing something like that solo, but…”

My first impulse was to rustle up some online and published terrain generators, but scanning through my own links I remembered my own frustrations trying to build such systems last decade when I was primarily a solo minis wargamer. The key problem for me being that many of them are too flatly random that is they generate incoherently terrain without much rhyme or reason and are boring as hell. Here is a dull little desert next to a bland forest next to some “open.”

So where to start?

Fortunately I can think of two good starting points: the ever-useful trainwreck that is the first edition AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide and an old Avalon Hill Game, Source of the Nile. Since my time is limited (the Dunes call) I will concentrate on the first.

Appendix B: Random Wilderness Terrain (page 173) has a nice framework, a relatively easy and elegant system of charts. Promisingly these charts take into account the terrain you are just leaving (and really this will work even better with a pointcrawl or mapless system). So if you are leaving a hilly area you are way more likely to hit more hills or mountains than you are a swamp.

Click to Enlarge

D&D is chalked full of random monster encounters by terrain (hard to get past the first edition DMG again) so no need to go there but it would be handy and nice to have some places to generate random color. Fortunately there boat loads of handy online generators that can cover that in an interesting way. Take this page on Abulafia alone (especially this one and this one which you can just keep regenerating when you need interesting places).

Before shoving off this is perhaps an ideal question to extend to the collective brain trust: what random terrain generators do you know about that fit this bill (and please read the specific query)?

Slumbering Ursine Dunes Is A-Comin'

I've jibber jabbered here and there about the Slumbering Ursine Dunes, the Mythical Wilderness sub-region of the campaign that I have been slowly, slowly, slowly turning into a mini-sandbox for public consumption.

Longtime readers will have probably noticed that I have also spent a good chunk of time here on the blog and on Google Plus raising criticisms of the excesses of the rpg crowd-funding way and the commercialization of our hobby. As I gear up for horror of horrors a modest Kickstarter in early September I also gear up for not being a complete ass of a hypocrite.

So here's what you can expect as counter-measures against douchery in the Kickstarter:

1. That when it goes live the manuscript will be in a “pre-print” done state. It is currently in its fifth round of aggressive editing and the two tireless editors, Robert Parker and Anthony Picaro, have done the Lord's work in whipping my lazy, indulgent 50-plus digest-sized pages of text into some coherence. There will be no getting stuck in the hard-to-maintain cycle of motivating, writing, playtesting--and avoiding your collective wrath as a result.

2. A bottom $1 or 2 “test drive” tier where you can get the artless PDF immediately (all tiers will get this but I wanted to give folks something my cheap and picky self would want.)

3. A lot of thought has gone into the project not getting bogged down in the usual morass of crowdsourcing delays (and excuses). Higher backer-tiers and stretch goals have been kept modest with an eye on being able to be put together at a reasonably quick pace. Importantly the print publication will be done through RPG Now/RPG Drive-Thru's print-on-demand with an at-cost coupon being sent to backers thus reducing the major delaying woes of printing and fulfillment. (It also means that UK backers can get domestic shipping rates.)

4. That a sizable chunk of the budget is going to pay first the talented David Lewis Johnson (who has also played in the campaign) for gorgeous art and cartography. Another quarter-percentage chunk is going to pay for the editing and layout (yay Mike Davison). While KS's skimpy restrictions don't allow you to directly fund-raise most if not all of what I take all the end of that pie will be going to pay for the filing and legal costs of reviving Hydra, my hippy-ideal game design cooperative, as a worker-owned company (more about that later in the week).

The Golden Barge cover (adventurers likely to disappear)

But enough about the hand-wringing, here are the fun things you can expect from the Dune:

A pointcrawl of the otherwordly Dunes region. Beyond the big ticket adventure sites you will find along the way include a Polevik-haunted rye field, a Zardoz head-living hermit (that scraggly fellar above), bearling pilgrimage site and other assorted madness. 

Two separate “dungeon” sites, the biomechanical, lost-in-time Golden Barge and the warring demi-gods Glittering Tower, with enough detail and portability to be slotted into an existing campaign (as can many of the adventure nodes).

A subsystem for modeling the mythic weirdness of the Dunes in the Chaos Index, a dynamic events systems. Actions of the players in the sandbox will escalate or deescalate the levels of events from blood-rain thunderstorms to an aerial invasion of magictech bubble cars.

Four competing factions operating inside the Dunes, plus guidelines for their mutual interactions.

Unique, “unlockable” player classes, spells and magic items compatible with Labyrinth Lord or really any other oldish D&D game.

15 new and unique monsters, many drawn from Slavic mythology (with a twist or three, naturally).

Some flipping great cover and interior art by David. Check out some of the early sketches.  

Mythical Wilderness

“Going up that river was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings. An empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest. The air was warm, thick, heavy, sluggish...It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention.”

Joseph Conrad, The Heart of Darkness

One of the enduring themes of neo-oldish D&D in the past five years has been the notion of dungeon as a “mythic underworld.” Philotomy the originator of the phrase stated it quite succinctly: “a mega dungeon should have a certain amount of verisimilitude and internal consistency, but it is an underworld: a place where the normal laws of reality may not apply, and may be bent, warped, or broken.”

Inexplicably the theme hasn't extended itself as thoroughly to the ancient realm of the mythic: wilderness. Projecting our dreams and ideas into the wilds is a timeless thing that changes with our own times. It is nature as giver, supernatural evil, challenge, peaceful refuge, antidote to civilized decadence or whatever. The theme endures and deserves some gaming love as a motif for adventure sites.

Of course in fantasy gaming almost all wilderness is mythical in the sense that human civilization has a weak hold and things monstrous or magical often live in their bounds. But I'm talking here about the cranked up high version. The kind of wilderness that is truly otherworldly, the enchanted wood, divine mountain, sacred grove or magic garden gone feral.

Mythical Wilderness is a major running theme in the eponymous campaign. Where going into the wilds—crossing into the Weird--is going into a different physical reality. Characters can feel an electric undercurrent as they pass out of the human realm and can expect just about anything.

Not surprisingly as it comes straight out of that broken line of reasoning and play, Mythical Wilderness plays a huge role in the soon-to-be published mini-sandbox Slumbering Ursine Dunes (now in its fifth editing iteration and being run again on Google Plus if you'd like to come out and play).

The Dunes incorporates most of the following laundry list: an internal ecology and weather climate distinct from the surrounding “real world”, impossibly large dunes; magical fields; mythical demi-god guardians, and a random "weird" events system, a chaos index, that dynamically changes the sandbox with player actions.

Common Features

Internal Dynamics Trump Ecology. It may have beasts going through the motions of such things as predation or a climate cycle or the like or it may have nothing at all like that (no mundane animals, nothing consumed/shat etc). The internal logic and dynamics of the place trumps all and it is not beholden to the regular rules of either the mundane natural world or human civilization.

Unhooked from Time and Space. Time is completely relative inside it and may have any number of effects. It may work like the Faerie mounds or realms of Northwestern European folklore with years passing in the outside world for a matter of days inside. Or it may preserve residents of an ancient past or border/open into another plane of existence altogether.

Inimical or Supernatural Terrain. Trees may grow to fantasic heights or widths. Whole forests of giant gnome red cap mushrooms may bloom. Miniature mountain ranges rise, amnesia-producing rivers spring or seas of lava spread. The terrain itself may even be actively hostile to outsiders, twisted trees and vines may trip or attack.

Bends Outside Magic. Spell effects will often be different. Certain spells may be amplified, dulled or neglected in effect. Certain areas may be magically fertile or completely barren. Endless fun for the GM.

Layers of Mystery. Part of the great fun of having this kind of funhouse wilderness is that what

makes it all tick—the why and how of the whole thing-- is often something wholly inexplicable at first. Like a great dungeon or adventure site those layers get peeled away in exploration. Think of the Island in Lost here.

Powerful, Semi-Divine Boss/Force. Invariably the strange, weird, mysterious and fantastical nature of the Mythic Wilderness is due to a force or master. A terribly powerful being-- the Horned Master of the Wild Hunt, Green Man, Faerie Queen, Demonic Tree-Spirit, Batshit Archmage or what have you—that the PCs run from/parlay/barter/fight.

Anything else you think should make this list? War stories of your own creations?

The Unbearable Dullness of DnD Wilderness

The road runs crooked here, the braying radio long since turned off. My mind has retreated to that long contemplative place, a slower mode that is all about absorbing details of the countryside. Though the two tons of steel and fiberglass molding are hurtling through time/space at body-smashing velocity internally it feels slow and leisurely.

Old stoned piled fence set off against the gentle curve of a live-oak and cedar covered rise. Great leafy canopies of pecans and elms as the road drops alongside the white limestone banks of a muddy, engorged branch river. Riots of wildflowers bordering old barb-wired posts...and wait is that a herd of alpacas?

It's Conan Country too, this long Hill Country backroad runs 15-20 miles parallel with another that will take you to Cross Plains and Cimmeria. That strong sense of place in fantasy —my own that just has to happen to share part of Robert E. Howard's by the accident of birth—washes over me and, of course, I am thinking of things DnD.

Why is wilderness travel so damn dull in-game?

Maybe dull is over-strong. Why is it so consumed with what punctuates the traveling? The throw of a one and the sudden switch in mode to encounter. Or the mysterious appearance of a site of interest, the burned out, ivy-choked shell of a tower and the like. Granted these can be exciting, the stuff of great sessions.

But why is the land itself left so faceless? It's “forest” full stop, perhaps grudgingly modified by being evergreens or light/heavy? It's the brown dull little triangles of “mountains” arranged in hexagonally-bordered bands. The wildly-varying and satisfyingly-creepy real world spread of wetlands is rendered “swamp”.

I look at the posts of my blogging friends and wilderness is almost inevitably handled as an exercise of game mechanics, the nerdy little debates (granted that I often love overly-much too) about how many beancounting checks for encounters per day over how many beancounting hexes.

Over the years I have managed to both play and run in a score or more of different wilds in a campaign—on a rare occasion recently with people who literally in this game from the first play group—and I've yet to ever feel that you had a strong sense of the Land you traveled.

The terrain has no face, little nuance and rarely itself also becomes the adventure. It lacks adversity. It's tangles and mysteries become obscured by a simple “lost” check. A horse never dies exhausted of it. A party rarely finds a spot that “they can't get there from here.” Occasionally you'll get charts for rockfalls and other impediments, but there seems to achingly little of it.

I can understand why the stick got bent this way. Nothing bores a group of players more than waxing into purple prose for more than five minutes without allowing them to hear the sound of their own voices. To be sure, it's a game. We fidget impatiently at the person who spends an eternity agonizing over whether they build three houses or a hotel on Baltic Avenue. They are hogging the play experience after all.

Of course I exaggerate for polemical effect. Everyday we also have examples of Gms breathing life into that aspect of the game. Why here today is my friend, Michael, giving some evocative twists to trekking through Grot. So here's my opportunity to turn it back to the positive (crap, it's only Monday, I can grouse later).

How are you sexing up that wilderness crawl? Can you impart a feeling of something unique about that land without achieving eye glazing? How do you make the wilderness itself the adventure? What's your trick?