Next week in Tech Tuesday, I’ll be sharing all the campaign files needed to run your own sessions of the Riverford Freelancers. In preparation for that, I’m excited to share offer some helpful tips for running a hexploration adventure with SyncRPG, either with our maps or some of your own!

The map of the Three Rivers Valley represents an area about a hundred square miles, each hex being twelve miles across. The map works well with the sandbox exploration rules in Paizo’s Ultimate Campaign. The provided tables for travel and exploration time based on party speed are useful for timing things, and most of the hazards or difficult terrains in the book would fit in well in the Three Rivers Valley.

There is also special SyncRPG token that contains a few macros on to help generate random events while the party explores. Hitting “Generate Event” will roll for a random chance at nothing important (50%) a hazard (10%), or an encounter appropriate for the area (40%). The macro will roll all the dice and let you know what, if anything, happened, complete with links to the relevant hazard information or SyncRPG NPC profile. Hitting “Random Encounter” will pull an entry off the encounter table if you want to force something to happen.

I hit “Generate Event” once for each hex the party enters, and sometimes a second time if they choose to fully explore the hex to represent the inherent danger of poking around where maybe they shouldn’t be. I also roll it three times per night, ignoring hazards, and ask for a declared watch before the party sleeps. If multiple encounters come up, I’ll pick the most appropriate or interesting one for the party.

You should always feel free to tweak the encounters as they come up! It’s always up to you to add an extra monster or two if your party need a bit more of a challenge, or to flat out ignore an encounter that might be too much for the party to handle.

SyncRPG provides a number of free maps for the different types of terrain in the Three Rivers Valley, including plains, forests, and mountains. When a random encounter or hazard is generated, it’s easy to click through to find usable tokens and find an appropriate map to use.

Finally, as the map is borrowed from our adventure The Rescue of Doniert Ironvale, the majority of locations around the map have their own maps. Both Gotian and Riverford have been drawn by Robert Brookes, and all of the “E” locations are optional, standalone encounters with maps from Kristian Richards and Daniel Menendez. The module is free, so if you don’t have it yet, go “buy” it in our store and check out what else is going on in the Three Rivers Valley!

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