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  • the mission hexflower

    To start off: Celestial Bodies is Kickstarting in early March 2025. Click this link if you want to know more.

    Mission generation in tabletop games has been a problem that I have sought to solve. It’s come to the forefront of my mind while working on Celestial Bodies, which is explicitly a gm-less and, for the very brave, a solo tabletop game. This was a non-negotiable aspect of the game when I approached Binary with the idea in 2023, and our initial release did not offer much in the way of support for GM-less play, which led to a lot of confusion. (You can GM it if you want, I’m not your dad.) More importantly, one of the issues I had to tackle was making generating a random mission satisfying and challenging without sacrificing the ability to be surprised by what you have to do or what comes up in the mission. I have seen endless horizons of generating missions in the footnotes of tabletop rpgs, using tables and dice, and the mission hexflower does not distinguish itself so much from these to make it unfamiliar and unwieldy. What really drew me to the hexflower in terms of generating missions is the proclaimed reasoning for the invention of the hexflower, which is the “built-in memory” – it is a tangible way of tracking where you are going in a way that has been affected by where you have been.

    What better for generating your quest or mission than to have your next step made possible because of the one you were in prior? It took a few days for my brain to come into writing it, and it’s in the current edition of Celestial Bodies in a form that is currently lacking.

    The primary considerations of a mission or questing hexflower are:

    1. Finding the middle ground between generic and detailed;
    2. Figuring out what the player does that will influence where they will go;
    3. Deciding what events go where, and how the players’ potential actions influence what you put where;
    4. Finishing the mission.

    Secondary considerations and potential variations on this idea will follow. To follow along, download this mission hexflower section from the Celestial Bodies: TItan Edition pdf. It is not necessary for reading the rest of the blog, it just provides some extra context.

    Finding the middle ground


    Depending on the size and genre of the game, this necessitates variability. For Celestial Bodies, I wrote events with the idea that other factions of varying moods would be involved, but I left the inclusion of those factions up to other systems that slot in with the mission generation. When a faction of a certain temperament is mentioned, it is rolled, and for the rest of the mission that faction is involved when that temperament comes up. Celestial Bodies also necessitated varying settings for the events, because there is no “one size fits all” sequence that feels like a challenge in every setting one might find themselves in while playing the game. A Titan is not a moon, which is not a planetary colony nor an asteroid field or space station. What fits for your game or your setting that you’re creating the events for depends on what you’re making, but it’s important to have enough sets of events to fill out the hexflowers that fit the different places they’ll be used. This entails a lot of writing and modification.

    Figuring out what the player does


    In Celestial Bodies, non-combat actions are determined by spending attributes. Attributes can be spent both in and out of combat, and the same pool is used for the duration of the mission. While using the mission hexflower, various non-combat events are presented that can use the various attributes to avoid or complete. In the “space debris” event list, one of the events is a meteor hurtling closely towards your group. In this case, using Flash to get out of the way or Force to destroy the asteroid before it hits you is appropriate. Once the event is addressed, the attribute(s) spent affect the 2d6 roll. If you used force to destroy the meteor with missiles, you add +2 to the 2d6 roll, which typically pushes your roll towards the left/top-left. For combat hexes, the rounds of combat taken are added to the 2d6 roll. If it takes you 4 rounds to defend yourself from an ambush, you roll 2d6+4.

    Deciding how you want your players to interact with the events is very dependent on how you want players to interact with your game. OSR favors puzzles, and could benefit from a looser set of guidelines – but still guidelines – on how the next hex is selected or rolled. For solo play, having a set of concrete cause-and-effect rules can help with decision paralysis.

    Deciding what events go where


    This is a direct followup to number 2, and will go hand-in-hand with the decisions you make. If you want missions to be fraught with danger and consequences, it is a good idea to make aggressive actions push the player towards the results of those actions. More combat, deadlier combat, and generally unpleasant situations should be, in this case, more likely to roll when this happens. Not every game or situation is deadly or aggressive, and the goal may be to avoid combat altogether. Taking actions to avoid combat and hostility would then beget less combat and less hostility. In Celestial Bodies, we organized the events loosely based on what attribute was used previously. Force begets Force, Precision begets Precision, and engaging in combat will bring you more combat. As a result, a player realizing they were too heavy handed in their previous hex allows them to adjust their approach, and de-escalate (or escalate, if they tread too lightly).

    Necessarily you must also consider how you roll or determine where you go next on the hexflower. In the case of Celestial Bodies, the roll is 2d6 +/- a modifier based on your attribute. The original blog post for the Hexflower Engine includes some variations on the rolls, but experimenting is your best friend.

    The number of hexes you include in the hexflower will also influence where you place events and how players interact with them. We chose 19 for Celestial Bodies, which provides a balance between variety, the effort on our part to write everything, and becoming overwhelming to navigate. Making a hexflower too large might mean that players never reach the edge-case events, but making one too small becomes repetitive. Too large of a hexflower also comes with diminishing returns. One at 19 or 37 hexes will feel sufficiently robust, and it’s unlikely to reach even most of these hexes even when you repeat missions using the same one.

    Finishing the mission


    In the current version of Celestial Bodies, you finish the mission when you decide when you’ve reached your objective. Objectives are a d6 list including things like “Combat”, “Recon”, and “Exploration”, and currently you just decide as a group (or solo) when you’ve reached that objective. Personally, now that I’ve had more time to sit with this system, I’ve come to the idea that there needs to be a more concrete and objective way to classify how and when you finish the mission. My main idea is tying points to each event, but I’m also considering calculating attributes spent along with the contents of the event into some conceivable number that you tally up in the appropriate categories. For Snow’s game .dungeon, where I have influenced her idea of a random quest generator for her questing booklet, we talked about calculating how to determine these results. In .dungeon, quests area going to be reminiscent of MMO quests, and things like “Gather 12 herbs” and “Kill 3 ants” make more sense and are more quantifiable than they would be in Celestial Bodies. For solo play I find it more important to have something cut and dry for finishing a mission, again to assist with decision paralysis. For group play, reaching a consensus can be just as suitable. There are shades between these options that I, personally, have yet to explore.

    VARIATIONS

    1. Playing Cards
      One idea I had while writing this post was using values, suits, or other identifiers on Tarot cards and playing cards to influence where you go on the hexflower, or influence the contents within the hexflower. The idea here would be assigning concepts to the cards, such as the number of people or combatants you encounter, or even what you might find within that encounter, to the cards. You could draw a card (or roll a die) that determines which direction you go on the hexflower, and use the value of the card/draw a card to influence what happens within the frame of the event. Special cards like major arcana or jokers could have even stranger effects.
    2. No Dice At All
      If you have a way to present six options for the players to take, that could directly influence the next hex they reach on the hexflower. This has a bit of a choose your own adventure aspect to it, and would slot in nicely to narrative and diceless games while still providing a bit of structure to the sequence of events.

    More variations will be added to this post as I consider them.

    I took much of my inspiration for this from the original Goblin’s Henchman hexflower engine blog post. These are my thoughts and evolution of the ideas I took from reading this Hexflower Engine blog post.

  • project_update.001

    Current to-do list1:

    1. HAPPY99 [KICKSTARTED PREVIOUSLY]
    2. Celestial Bodies [KICKSTARTING SOON]
    3. art for .dungeon [KICKSTARTING NOW]

    HAPPY99 is proceeding apace, though the past day or so I’ve been taking a break because I like to work myself too much. I’m working on a companion website for it, which really sparked my inspiration to write it, too.

    Celestial Bodies will remain untouched until it’s funded; there are currently no edits we need to make on the pdf itself, and everything left is for the Titanic Eclipse edition, which is the final version. I do, however, need to make more assets for the Kickstarter page, and generally fiddle with it until it suits mine and Binary’s standards.

    As for the art for .dungeon, I have a Nintendo DS Lite with a flashcart that will be used for the art, and it’s all set up and ready to go. Someone in Snow’s Discord server created a useful python script to convert the files made by the drawing program into .pngs. Thank you, TheOddFireFox!

    I have a fair number of smaller, secret, or vastly undeveloped projects that are simmering alongside these three, but this is the current priority. I aim to have HAPPY99 text complete and the text document sent out for editing and reading for backers by mid-February, because Celestial Bodies will be launching early March. There are some friends I owe layout for because I promised I’d touch up their ashcan pdfs and some art commissions I need to finish for clients’ personal use that I’d like to get done in a timely manner.

    Oh, also, Rosethorn Keep will be available through Space Penguin Ink in a few months, which is very exciting! Myself and Kay worked very hard on this tabletop game and it’s fun!

    bye for now.
    Charlotte

    1. You may be wondering why this is a blog post and not a newsletter. Frankly I get intimidated by newsletters, especially for minutiae and updates. Plus, it’s easier to keep an archive of blog posts. I might make a newsletter in the future. I’ve tried a couple times but have not quite managed to make it work. But maybe, maybe, maybe! ↩︎