Fantastic Frontiers: The Expedition

I've decided to call my hexcrawl boardgame "Fantastic Frontiers", in imitation flattery of Avalon Hill's Magic Realm. It's also a slight tip of the hat to Fantastic, the pulp zine counterpart to Amazing Stories which exerted a substantial influence on early fantasy tropes in the 70s. It seems like a broad enough title to cover straight-ahead historical explorations in Africa and the Americas, as well as Lost World Victorian romances and straight sword and sorcery fantasy.

Anyway, my first decision was how to set the scale of the game. As previously indicated, most historical expeditions ranged from 20 to 1000+ members, depending on their objectives. Smaller expeditions were more scientific or cultural, and larger ones more military, but the transition between these two extremes was fairly fluid. The flexibility in size was almost entirely due to the addition of mercenaries and hirelings, with the core functions of leadership being provided by a consistently small band of loyal companions. This suggests the following structure:

• Leadership Party: Roughly 12 members or fewer, in search of glory
• An expedition commander
• A trusted lieutenant (Clark, to the commander's Lewis)
• Various steadfast companions-in-arms
• Mercenaries: Dozens to hundreds of soldiers to provide security, or act as a private army
• Followers: Non-combat personnel like porters and animal handlers, and a few skilled specialists

Here's an interesting run-down of the logistics of a 19th century hunting expedition from John Stater's Land of Nod blog, for reference. You can see the remarkable triangularity of this kind of enterprise. A few explorers at the top of the pyramid need the support of many more guards, servants, and attendants.

Of course, there were plenty of explorers who worked on a much smaller scale, and I want to include that possibility as well. But it's important to be able to scale up to the size of Cortes, when necessary, and it's easier to build game systems around that assumption and then work down from full size.

This places certain restrictions on the combat system. In particular, it needs to be a cumulative wargame-like system, as opposed to one that scales linearly (or heaven forbid, quadratically) with size. That implies something more like a system that compares total combat factors on each side, and then calculates who wins (and the resulting casualties) with a single dice roll.

There's typically a trade-off between the level of detail and the level of realism in adventure games. The more detailed characters become, the less willing a player is to see them killed off by the vagaries of battle and disaster. It's frustrating to develop a unique character who gets offed by a single dice roll -- one reason why, as modern RPGs have shifted toward extensive character customization, they've also endowed characters with massive amounts of "system armor" and "plot armor" that render them nigh immortal. I want to ensure that kind of customization doesn't come at the cost of realistic lethality.

To create a realistic game where death is commonplace, it's probably best to have dissimilar levels of detail for the leaders and the followers. That allows an expedition to be nearly wiped out, reinforcing the notion of a dangerous world, while still letting the leaders survive from one adventure to the next. So I'm designing the leadership party to be represented by characters with a full set of variable RPG-like statistics, while generic soldiers are interchangeable with differentiation only by type. Currently the statistics are

• Endurance: Represents physical capabilities and general toughness
• Intelligence: Represents capacity for academic learning
• Discipline: Represents training in technological weapons (guns, crossbows, artillery, etc)
• Charisma: Represents leadership and diplomatic potential

I intend to use d20-based mechanics, with statistics generated by the classic 3d6 bell curve. In fact, I rather like the idea of making the game system almost interchangeable with miniature and man-to-man combat from other d20 systems, so that very important battles could be fought out in full detail.

I also like the idea of advancement by level from experience, a totally artificial convention that still communicates that idea that your leaders are getting tougher and shrewder as they adapt to the challenges of an unfamiliar land. I definitely want to tie advancement to discovery rather than combat, though, to support the play of scenarios with mostly peaceful objectives.