Week 9: Journeys and changes

Slightly late this week, cause I was busy yesterday.

The Journeys

First journey

1. The hollow groves

   Echoing trees bristle along my route, by shy back whenever I get close, leaving an open path.

   1. 6 vs 4: As they part I see the light of a colossal lighthouse in the distance—topped with a single bulbous eye.

2. Sunburst river

   1. 3 vs 7: The river's blinding at this time of day. I have to wait until night, when the river looks like an ordinary day, before I can even attempt a crossing.
   2. 8 vs 7: The sun dies away, but its afternoon light still glows from the river. Still, not hot enough to burn me as I cross.

3. Carver keep

   Ziggurat topped by a hand that grasps and gropes the hillside to find “guests” to “keep safe”.

   1. 10 vs 5: It's night-time and the hand flops down the side of the keep in slumber, so I'm able to pass handily.

4. Nowhere dunes

   Anonymous in all directions.

   1. 9 vs 3: The black sun rises over the dunes to darken my path and mark the way forward.

5. The mouth of the world

   A gorge where sweet music rises.

   1. 8 vs 7: The day star rolls through the bottom of the gorge and lights the way down; I just barely get up the other side before it begins to rise into the sky for a new day.

Second journey

1. The sea of eels

   1. 4 vs 6: Endless towering shimmering grasses; wandering in circles through a natural maze, following animal tracks that lead nowhere or disappear mid-trot or -scurry; the traces of roads; long days eating stewed grass.
   2. 6 vs 6: A solar eclipse creates vivid rippling shadows on the ground.

2. Slime crag

   A rough rocky trail made safe by the passage of slime-carpeting giant snails, whose trails are just sticky enough to hold you to the rock faces without being so sticky you can't free yourself again.

   1. 8 vs 8: On the horizon, a mountain with a chunk—a bite?—taken out of it.

3. Silver desert

   1. 7 vs 8: Conspiratorial cacti raise hands to cover their mouths in conversation… or maybe it's just the heat taking its toll on me.
   2. 9 vs 8: The House of Nostalgia rises in the distance, clogged with mist.

Third journey

1. The frozen sea

   Glassy and pure, waiting for something to set it in motion again; dotted with fishing excavations.

   1. 5 vs 4: To the West, an inhabited island with a trail leading under an arch of wave to a little dock where a rowboat sits stuck in the water.

Fourth journey

1. Obedience pillar

   A fungal pillar spreading hallucinogens that draw in wildlife to gather spores and carry them far away. Harmless, but a time-waster.

   1. 11 vs 8: The wind changes and I pass the pillar to the North. In the far distance, a spaceship wreck looms like a discarded ring or eye.

Fifth journey

1. Dryroot Pass

   Fortified natural caverns festooned with crystal-growing mushrooms—an agricultural commune.

   1. 7 vs 5: In the distance, the sound of roaring flame and chants, but the path leads elsewhere.

2. Lifeblood roots

   1. 4 vs 5: An inverted leafless subterranean forest that confuses the eye.
   2. 5 vs 5: Another flame, and a rumbling heartbeat as if of a massive drum or Verne gun. Again, it's off the beaten path.

3. Mist river

   1. 4 vs 5: wreathed in spray and veiled by shadow, the underground rapids aren't safe to cross now—certainly not while it rains ammonia on the surface.
   2. 6 vs 5: another mighty flame, witnessed off the edge of the mist river's abyssal waterfall, and watching silhouettes.

4. Ancient stairway

   Stairs of well-laid regular stones that grow increasingly mislaid and misshapen along the descent.

   1. 7 vs 4: A flame across a gulf at the bottom of the stairs, a few fathoms down, not far.

5. Unremembered constellations

   Something twinkles high above on the cavern ceiling, creating the impression of callow, but brilliant stars.

   1. 9 vs 5: I hear the teeth of the predator that chases me, grinding and chattering all the way back at the doorway to this place.

Sixth journey

1. The powerways

   Old energy infrastructure bent to the service of industrial hamadryads.

   1. 10 vs 9: A river of slag winds its weary way to the sea far in the South.

2. The trestleways

   1. 8 vs 11: When the steel rails quiver they alert me to the passage of the next train, which arrives faster than sound. The hamadryads are busy, busy, busy.
   2. 7 vs 10:</strong> A day spent under a bridge avoiding acid rain and feeding scraps to baby sewer rats.
   3. 9 vs 9:</strong> There's a red-eyed radio mast amid grey-grass-swamped industrial ruins, visible from the final stretch of trestleway along to where I started.

Seventh journey

1. Spear-tree glades

   Sparse trees like flagpoles; they end in sharp, stubby branches with few leaves, surviving on the sleeping white land.

   1. 8 vs 7: A colossal mushroom to the Southwest, spongy and swaying in the breeze; its surface pores seem to gasp at the air.

Thoughts

This game's definitely much rougher than Stone Words Walk was at the start of its run. Straight away I started making changes. First, I ditched the inventory stuff because it felt better to get straight into the map part. Second, when I passed a Passage on the first roll I added a little description to the it so there was at least some detail for that part of the journey. Thirdly, in the sixth journey I tried reducing the Difficulty of a Passage by 1 for each roll to compensate for removing the mechanic that lets you skip difficult Passages.

I'm gonna try some major changes next week:

1. Instead of going straight in with nothing drawn on the map to start with, I'm gonna try the opposite: give the whole region a name, and draw the route from landmark to landmark. The landmarks are gonna start nameless; each one will get a name at the start of its Passage.

2. The region's basically gonna be one kinda-consistent environment (this is what I ended up doing in most of the journeys anyway).

3. I'm gonna keep the change I made in journey 6, basically adding 1 to the roll for each previous roll at that Passage.

4. On a roll of 1, the Passage will just be leaving the current location instead of going somewhere specific (and the roll to beat will just be the single d6 result).

The other big things I'm thinking of changing are:

• adding specific detail types (like SWW's Focus/Path/Impression/Event details) to draw attention to specific kinds of things in the world
• not drawing the route at the start and reworking the game around figuring out a route through unfamiliar terrain (like how SWW's about the first time encountering a specific place), focusing more on finding and understanding landmarks

The other issues I had were with drawing, specifically drawing the mechanical stuff vs the actual map. In the first journey I added both the individual dice rolls and each Passage's Difficulty, but that was way too cluttered. For the rest of the week I just wrote the Difficulty, but it feels weird to put the big obvious node in the middle of each leg of the journey and not at the end of the leg. Next week I'm gonna try putting them at the end and see if that works better.