Travel and Time - BitO (pt.3)
Running travel in Duskwall
This article contains affiliate links, meaning I get a commission if you make purchases using these links, at no cost to you.We’re hacking Blades in the Dark’s (Blades) setting of Duskwall with Into the Odd (ItO). You can get the Blades into the Odd (BitO) crossover that I’ve mashed together here for FREE. So far we’ve done a) character creation and gear and b) lairs, upgrades, and statblocks. Today, lets talk time tracking.
Calendar
Lucky for us, Duskwall comes with a calendar structure. Even better, a generous reddit user made a spreadsheet for it! I made my own copy and adjusted it slightly so it would fit on a double spread:
There’s a key for the holidays/festivals and notable city activities of each week day. Time passing is going to prompt PCs to pay for Vice, and PCs recovering stats too (e.g. STR). That’s long term time tracking, but what about within a day?
Hours and Minutes
For a more ‘heisty’ type game, I like the idea of switching out watches and dungeon turns to count in hours and minutes. Example: It takes an hour to stake out the place, but 3-5 minutes (3-5 turns) to break in and grab the oil painting.
Into the Odd thinks of combat rounds a being around a minute, so this works well, combat and dungeon turns/rounds are the same scale in BitO.
Duskwall keeps the normal 24 hours in a day (I say PCs need to sleep for 6-8). I want to use hours for travel time, and a pointcrawl of sorts. There’s the main map:
And a sub-district map with key landmarks:
We’re going to use a simple procedure for time taken, rather than labelling specific time on the pointcrawl:
This avoids much in the way of calculation. Note a carriage is 1 silver per hour of use.
Here’s the large scale map with a pointcrawl:
Travelling along any of these connecting lines takes 1 hour on foot. A journey from the Docks to Dunslough is 4 hours on foot, 2 hours by carriage if they pay 2S.
A district appears like this:
Judge any travel time in the district by focusing around these key landmarks. If they are ‘around area 1’ and want to move to ‘around area 4’, it would take 20 minutes to get there. Carriages are no good for this kind of travel, this is by foot.
Time matters
Players will think about the layout of the city and how it affects them. For example, they might set up safehouses in other districts, so that safety is always nearby.
What next?
We’ve done modifications to character creation, a setting specific equipment list, lair prices and upgrades, statblocks templates for NPCs, and now time tracking. But to run a classic sandbox we need encounters and factions. Next installment soon.
Recommendations
Product: A shout out for a creator friend, Ben of Adventures Await, who is gearing up for a system neutral, modular map tile Kickstarter! Check it out here. It’s a set of 32 base tiles, and there’s also a ‘furnishing kit’ full of smaller tokens that you can use to populate environments with even more detail!
Morktober: We’re over half way through Morktober! Let’s look at some of the cool stuff we made this week!
