The Terror Plateau
Consulting the Bones for a Hex Crawl
Hey! Like hexcrawls? Check this out:
I started a new tradition for myself: when I’m out of commission with illness, I sit down with some dice and use procedural generation to make a hex map and see what happens. This round it was an intense (and thankfully brief) bout of food poisoning, so I decided to flesh out my campaign setting’s Fantasy Magical Wasteland, called THE TERROR PLATEAU.
This is a terrible badlands known for strange, nightmarish monstrosities like Walking Trees, Reverse Centaurs, standing stones that follow visitors to dispense cryptic warnings and WHALES sailing the very skies like they were the sea. An alien God lies dreaming at the center of this Plain, and his dreams of what the world “should be” leak out into the waking world, making it a harsh, beautiful and dangerous place!
I initially borrowed this locale from Glen Cooke’s The Black Company books, referenced in passing as a menacing backstory and then coming into full focus later on when they’re in such bad straights that they flee into the wastes to evade their enemies. The idea of standing stones following interlopers and dispensing foreboding warnings had lodged itself fully into my mind, making its way into my campaign setting as The Terror Plateau (called The Plain of Fear in Cooke’s novels).
Blue anchors on the map are Sky Whale Graveyards, gigantic fields of bone hiding Necromantic treasures and mind-breaking whale songs on the wind. Cathedrals are giant pieces of rock floating without gravity, used by the Kor people as mobile settlements. A few years back a player wanted to play a character with the Kor ancestry (from Magic the Gathering, specifically Zendikar). For backstory, I stuck them in The Terror Plateau! The red trees are Coral Forest Wodes. I imagine the wasteland having odd patches of trees made from deep-sea coral, but in places with the icon there are entire haunted forests of the stuff called Wodes! Red skull and crossbones are Magical Weather Storms, where the random magical weather has become a static environmental hazard instead of a passing danger.
I created tables and randomly generated a primary terrain with which to brush through a larger section of the map (having this canvas segmented into 25 sections of 5x5 hexes) and manually painting-in the tiles. Then as the big sections go into each other, I follow my heart and connect patches of dunes or mountains to look more intentional. The program Hexographer makes this easy by letting you load in a low-opacity jpeg for the purposes of tracing!
Here are the tables I drew up:
The Procedure
Roll randomly for Primary Terrain, then roll on the corresponding table and manually paint the terrain to your desire
Then I rolled a d4 for the total number of settlements in an entire row of hex-groups. For another map it’d probably be better to make a roll for settlements in each group, but this is a magical wasteland. Settlements of any kind are rare!
I think the upper right part of the map has the most settlements, because I started with settlements per-group and then changed my mind!
Roll a d6 for the number of Points of Interest. Roll d100 for the points of interest, placing them within the hex wherever looks best.
I made an Evernote to keep the data in, taking notes as I went so I could find it again for later reference!
Rinse, repeat, and you’ve got a hex map!
Of course you’ll need to flesh it out with monsters, figuring out procedures for all the fun stuff like standing stones and wodes of Coral Forests, but that’s it!
Then the process becomes manually adding features. Changing some features so mountains come together to form large ranges, separating stretches of plains, etc. The biggest manual addition was the lake in the top section. There were large stretches of badlands without any points of interest, and I realized that since I placed The Terror Plateau uphill from a river valley in my world, I realized there’s got to be a huge lake to feed all those tributaries. So, a big lake in the center!
Sidebar: the Terror Plateau almost takes the place of the heart of The Sahara in my world, dividing a continent into separate ecosystems. This, and a process of partial-desertification were inspired by articles about the prehistoric Sahara fed by the ancestral version of Lake Chad, called Lake Mega Chad by archaeologists. A nerdy sidebar for my take on a Fantasy North Africa that I’ll dig into in an article one day, but here’s more if you’re interested!
This map-making methodology is adapted from Jim Davis’ wonderful video on making hexcrawls for personal use. I highly recommend watching the original here!
The reason I like this methodology is that casting the bones allows you to generate random points of data and then derive patterns from them, like seeing shapes in tea leaves. Several patterns appeared to shape the story of the map that I never intended:
Many, Many Towers
It’s only a 5% chance on the Points table I made to create a tower, but that 5% at the bottom of the percentile kept coming up over and over. While I imagined a few wizard towers being on the map, there ended up being so many I started to color-code them. Now there are many wizards in towers, each devoted to different disciplines of magic all competing to take advantage of the magic of the alien God dreaming at the heart of the land.
At the greatest stretch of Underdark Broken Lands, there ended up being TWO towers in the same cluster, as well as two Coral Forest Wodes. I placed them all adjacent, the dice painting a picture of two towers perched over a great coral forest throwing lightning bolts at each other, dueling for dominance!
Ruins Galore
The Point of Interest table has a 24% chance to produce Ruins. A 2-in-6 chance of it being a Castle - in my mind a “ruin” in form but actively occupied by bandits, raiders or turncoats from foreign armies hiding out in the wasteland.
The other results on the Ruin die are from different civilizations having failed to establish bases or outposts into the plateau. In such an alien place, visitors are never fit for a long-term stay! There are Tazib ruins (minotaurs off the map in a Right direction, which would be North). There are ruins from The Dragon Empire (off the map to the Left, which would be South). There are Palatine ruins of sky ports (what started as a kind of Fantasy Roman empire, but has become more Valyrian in my notes over the years).
And then I made a casual inclusion of something called a “Father Tree Garden”. Father Tree being the name of the alien God dreaming at the heart of the plateau. I thought it would be fun to include sites where weird wizards or druids have taken trimmings from this alien God, trying to grow an offshoot for their own purposes with predictably disastrous results. I figured this would be a pretty rare site of adventure, but these ruins (which I ended up color-coding green) were not rare!
Which leads me to this cluster of points. What is he cooking???
This ring of broken lands surrounds three tiles of “normal” badlands, ruins of each civilization on the Ruin sub-table, as well as two castles. A standing stone, a large settlement, and a Father Tree Garden the size of a city lies at the center. Thanks to the dice I ended up creating a hidden valley containing something VERY important, even if I don’t know it yet. Is this the only garden that was successful in trying to clone an offshoot of Father Tree? Are they a community run by an order of druids who know the true, unimpeachable path to their alien God?
Terrifying Tables
Here are some quick tables to try and get the flavor of the map across.
The following mechanics use terminology from Kill Jester’s ttrpg Errant, which I’ll be writing an article about next issue. Even if you’ve not heard of this game before, I think the terminology will be pretty self evident if you’re familiar with TTRPGs and hexcrawls.
Errant uses an EVENT DIE [D6] to determine what happens at the end of a TRAVEL TURN. Here it is broken down:
Encounter
The COMPANY encounter NPCs.
Delay
The COMPANY must spend the turn resting (and gaining a Negative Event die) or suffer 1 Exhaustion / each.
Resource Use
Deplete all rations by 1; starving is Exhausting!
Local Effect
An effect occurs which is particular to the region the COMPANY is in
This is where The Terror comes in…
Clue (sign of encounter)
The COMPANY receives some clue to what their next encounter might be; footprints, sound of beating wings, figure in a mirage on the horizon.
Free
Nothing happens! Huzzah!
In the course of a TRAVEL TURN the EVENT DIE is rolled once to see what happens during that turn. These turns typically correspond to 4 hours of fictional time, so at least 4 turns can take place before night falls and rest happens. (making a day of travel consist of 6 total turns, but an ERRANT needs to sleep for two turns to rest…)
For making The Terror Plateau feel different, I’m going to expand #4 Local Effect and #1 Encounter into sub-tables. Behold, and despair!
A local effect on this map manifests as a magical weather event! Most of them are bad and immediately prompt navigation checks to avoid, but a few have silver linings.
CARCINOFOG
Necromantic fog seeps up. Test Phys or gain 1 Exhaustion. Dying of exhaustion this way causes a creature to rise as a zombie!
Roll a D6. On a 1, the COMPANY must avoid D6 zombified travelers who ran afoul of the fog.
Spontaneous Amphibious Downpour (S.A.D)
Confused, bewildered frogs plummet to their deaths from rain clouds. The COMPANY must test their Skill or take D2 damage.
Frog Meat’s on the Menu: The next successful Forage action in this hex adds 4 SUPPLY rather than 2.
RAIN
Mundane, refreshing water falls from the sky.
Before the eyes of the COMPANY, coral grows up from the ground into the shape of trees.
The DV of the next navigation check is reduced by 2.
GLASS RAIN
Shards of glass fall quickly and suddenly. The pathfinder makes a navigation check to find safe shelter. On success, the COMPANY is safe.
On failure, the COMPANY all test Phys, taking D4 damage on a failure.
SPACE STORM
The environment around them changes suddenly, presaged by the sound of creaking branches. The terrain swaps at random, raising the DV of all navigation checks in this hex by 6. [If you get the same terrain they’re currently in, reroll]
D6 1. Forest (Coral) 2. Lake 3. Desert 4. Dunes 5. Mountains. Steppe
TEMPORAL HURRICANE
The COMPANY hears roiling memories, lost loves and forgotten desires breaking like thunder in the skies above.
Test Skill to evade the hurricane. The DV = the number of travel turns they’ve taken without sleeping. On failure, a PC ages 1d4x10 years.
I wanted the presence of whales in the sky to be a positive one, but then I also realized that there might be other oceanic creatures flying in the skies who are much nastier. Now turtles are the plateau’s equivalent of pigeons or crows, swooping down and harassing travelers for their rations. It makes it weirder that these ocean creatures fly purely through magic, having no wings whatsoever. If Father Tree dreams it, it’s true!
Where to Start
Another storytelling consideration: “Where do you start a group of players?”
If the players learned of the location mid-campaign and decided to enter it, I’d probably have them start up North, sailing a boat to one of many destinations:
Placing an object of a PC’s quest (or backstory!) further into The Plateau would make for a fun adventure, necessitating maybe hundreds of miles of overland journey. And, my version of Lake Mega Chad has 4 wizard’s towers within reach, 3 of them probably literally on the coast.
If we were doing a Terror Plateau campaign, I’d probably start them here:
This is one of the more interesting corners that came about from this process. These dunes have everything: a handful of known settlements, caves and monster lairs, and are centrally located enough that players could venture out from the dunes and have some interesting adventures to pick from. Venturing South takes you to that oasis settlement, West takes you to some valuable loot behind monsters, and North takes you to several Father Tree Garden sites.
As a campaign starting point, I’ll name this The Devil’s Dunes, and now the monster lair is a powerful Devil bound to stalk the area and kill war-bands trying to cross The Terror Plateau.
Consulting the Bones
Using a combination of one’s own artistic intuition and random tables really nets you something special. I really like how The Terror Plateau turned out, and it was a fun way to spend an evening while I was sick out of my mind.
I’d done this for fun once before, and I have bits of advice I’d give to my future self. For one, I skewed the primary terrain to favor badlands. This creates large stretches of one terrain with pockets or small stretches of other terrain, like steppe, dunes, etc. If I wanted a much more intricate or diverse map - like a land of river valleys, for example - you would need to diversify the tables. Having a distinct subtable on each result of a d6 would take you longer, but allow for a much broader swath of terrain with which to paint manually.
Scale is also something to consider. The Terror Plateau is big. The center of one hex to another is 25 miles. That’s way bigger than I’d typically use for crawling purposes, but the fiction of this place is that it’s a vast magical wasteland. Once I started applying the Errant rules to the map as well, I realized that having a map that big would require (aprox) 4 days to travel between hexes. In terms of TRAVEL TURNS, that’s 16 travel turns per hex. That’s way too many. So, I’ve got thinking to do on that!
For future maps I’ll keep them to a scale of 6 (or fewer) miles per hex, which allows for a lot more exploration of the landscape in a single adventuring day.
For example, the last time I was sick I put together a gargantuan savanna themed hex map dense with detail, and the scale of its hexes were 1 mile. This allows for lots of exploration and travel in an adventuring day; while also supporting the fantasy of an expansive, arid wilderness. Maps are fun supplements for TTRPGs because they support a table’s fantasy of actually being in a “real” place.
One day I may fully flesh out The Terror Plateau, but for now it’s been a fun exercise! It’s emboldened my love for Kill Jester’s TTRPG Errant as (my) perfect D&D-like (more like D&D replacement), and next time I hope to do a breakdown on why I think it’s worth trying.
Until then, keep being creative!