I was saying to Marcia and Emmy that I’m feeling a little tired regarding the complexity of Knave 2e’s abundance of hazard dice, and mentioned that I am preferring a token system right now. I use poker chips.

Buy Supply Chips in town, at the cost of 1 gp per Supply Chip. They take as much space as a ration or 6 torches, and replace those things and assorted paraphernalia. Parties may pool Supply Chips but carry them individually.

To travel forward a hex or a dungeon area, expend a supply. To find a secret location or door where you are, expend an additional supply.

Supply exists in the world, so you find it and leave caches of it, but its use is abstracted in a way that incorporates time. Whenever you spend a supply, there is a 1-in-6 chance of a random encounter.

Importantly, Supply is not directly related to finding loot. Importantly, you can spend additional supply to find a secret win can lead to or contain treasure, but not to uncover the treasure directly. The players are not inventing treasure, they are discovering hidden places.

Gravek and her party are travelling through the Gruelsome Forrest. It is dense, and it takes two supply to advance through a hex unless they have a guide or are familiar with it. They climb a tree, and see signs of a valley or sinkhole to the west. Do they expend additional supply to investigate? They do, and discover a hidden location: The Funguzoid Sinkhole of Fr-ang Fr-zul.

Soulumo and their party are on the second depth of the Fane of the Brain-Snake. They are in an otherwise unremarkable blood-shrine, but are suspicious of the carvings in the walls. Do they expand an additional supply to investigate? They do, and they discover that inside a gargoyles mouth is a map leading to “The Golden Scroll of Saint Barabbas the Lion-Maned”.

In either of these cases, the party should find what a secret when they search. I keep a list of secrets and maps ready for most regions I play in, unconnected to places or people. I keep unique loot tables for regions as well. There might already be a secret location or a secret door, or a secret treasure in the location, in which case they find that. But the most important thing is that they find interesting actionable information first, and stuff second. If you’re having trouble with what they find in a room or location without anything hidden, I might suggest adding a world anchor to something from this table:

1. Note (courier, a memo, to self)
2. Book (secret history, heretical scripture, personal journal)
3. Map (hastily scrawled, architectural, surrealist)
4. Key with a unique shape (unlabelled, labelled mysteriously, tracked)
5. Small treasure of mysterious origins, requiring a specific antiquist to identify, who wants more and larger
6. A portal, leading to…? (a viewpoint only of, one-way to danger and reward, two-way and impossible to close)

Anyway, that’s how I’m gamifying travel at the moment, being annoyed with rations and torches and timekeeping and terrain and all that malarchy. It’s clearly inspired by Hunt Tokens, but they’re not really enough for me.

There is a lot of room for improvement, I’m sure. Riff on this, I know Emmy and Marcia will have revolutionised my approach by the time this goes up.

12th July, 2023

Idle Cartulary