Tuesday, November 2, 2010
Outdoor Survival
Underworld & Wilderness Adventures recommends using the board from Avalon Hill's 1972 board game Outdoor Survival for a wilderness map. Here's the Boardgame Geek page for Outdoor Survival, which includes pictures of the game. The playing board is marked by a hexagonal grid, sized 34 x 43 hexes. The map includes various terrain types, such as woods, desert, mountains, and swamps. Nine buildings and twenty-four catch-basins dot the map. U&WA says to use the buildings as towns, and the catch-basins as castles. Some of those castles would be ruins, others not. This seems to be the assumed starting area for a campaign. Hexes are assumed to be five miles across. A man on foot can cross three hexes per day, depending upon terrain type. A "light" horse (40gp) can cross 10 hexes a day. So, a party might reasonably be able to cross the map from corner to corner in about a week. That seems like a manageable starting point. Have you used the Outdoor Survival map for a campaign?
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I've used the map (or a segment of it) for a fill-in emergency wilderness but never for a whole campaign
ReplyDeleteI've used it a couple of times for OD&D campaigns or side projects that never really got off the ground. There are a couple versions out there digitized per the Volume 3 guidelines for campaign use.
ReplyDeleteClones should come with a numbered hex map showing cities and castles for the referee to populate. I've been reading the castles section in U&WA today. It's strange that none of the retroclones have done much with castles, as those rules strike me some of the most interesting.
ReplyDeleteTo contextualize the size of the map, it's somewhere between West Virginia and Maine.
ReplyDeleteLooks like a cool game. Shame I have never seen it in real life.
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