Best Left Buried: Zones 'n Stuff

Best Left Buried: Zones, Props, and Hazards

Inspired by Ava Islam's (@yungdumbitch) tweet talking about Monster Manuals and their lack of terrain / environmental pieces that can be dropped into combat encounters I've decided to do some of that work myself using Best Left Buried. However, the subject of the environment is huge with many layers intersecting with adventure design, worldbuilding, and tons of other stuff. What I'm interested in unpacking here will are the parts of the environment we interact with on a regular basis inside of a conflict. For that purpose we use...

                                               ZONES

For our purposes Zones are pieces of an environment grouped together by a specific use or theme relative to the scale of the action. A city, a trench, that bookcase and the area around it are each zones for different kinds of games. Zones are the language of waypoints and landmarks that you probably used recently to give someone directions to the grocery store. They're simple and don't require much work to grok if used right but if not well thought out can be just as boring as the vanilla grey stone hallway made up of 10x10 squares that is often standard fare.

Hazards

How do we combat this? Well, the same way we combat boring terrain in general; put something in it. For that we have options. First up are Hazards. Do you have a boring 20x20 stretch of sand? Put a giant antlion in there waiting to trap a whole party in its vortex and gobble up the wizard. That's what I would call a Hazard. I steal the word Hazard from Pathfinder 2E where terrain challenges like this are presented with statblocks and meant to be dropped into different types of encounters be they exploration or combat similar to what Ava Islam's tweet has asked of modern monster manuals. So, problem solved right? Well, sorta.

The system for Hazards in Pathfinder while very useful I believe falls short of being the end all be all of environmental challenges for a number of reasons. Chief among them that they are all at the end of the day traps of various kinds. Traps are great mind you but are a very specific tool to establish no-no zones or make movement within a space tactically fraught. That's great. If all you end up doing from now on is putting a trap in every set piece encounter from you won't go wrong but I think we have room for some more variety. What else could we add to a conflict to make the environment more exciting?

Props

Guns! Well, some of them can be guns. I'm talking about what those guns are to our characters beyond just tools of destruction. They are props. Bits of the environment characters can just pick up and use against each other or their enemies in hopefully spectacular fashion. Horror and action cinema love props as silver bullets or just more exciting methods of inflicting pain. A prop can be anything from a vehicle to a giant mace or a row of meat hooks dangling from the ceiling.

Mechanically, this can be expressed as Improvised Weapons or even Adaptations gained temporarily while the prop is in play. Something I'll note here that I feel is worth mentioning is that these props should not be "aligned" in any way. That is to say that the Cryptdiggers and their foes should be equally capable of using these props. Most of these will probably be born out of a particular monster's strange habits or curious artifice anyhow.

Adding Zones, Hazards, and Props to the proverbial monster manual seems like a complete enough answer but in the future would like to posit one more thing that would wrap all of these pieces together.

For now, here are a few sample Zones to add to your combat encounters. Enjoy!

Example Zones

Weapon Racks: A character in the same Zone can draw a weapon from the rack and attack as an action. Weapons drawn from the rack are destroyed after an Attack, hit or miss. 
Special: If a character inflicts an Injury while near the Weapon Racks they can choose to impale their foe on the racks numerous weapons inflicting a second injury but destroying the Weapon Racks.

Fire Pit: Moving into or through the zone requires a Wits check or else take D3 Vigour damage and get set on Fire.

Characters adjacent to the Zone can expend their Move to kick hot coals in their opponent's face making them Blind until they can remove the coals.

Captive Cage: Impassable. Characters adjacent to the Zone can make a Wits check to open the cage unleashing a random Brigand with a random Mood aligned to the side who rescued them.

When a character inflicts an Injury on a foe in an adjacent Zone they can also lock them inside of an empty cage. Brawn check Against The odds to Escape.

In addition to that I've been running Improvised Weapons differently from the beginning just because I enjoy the cinematic flair of using those bits in spectacular but temporary ways.

Improvised Weapons

Breaks when you keep a 1 or 2. Functions as a weapon closest to what it resembles. Ex. An oar is a Long weapon. Darts or knives are Thrown. A rebar club is Heavy. Can also be a Gunpowder or Cowboy Gun if appropriate.

Epilogue?

So, originally this was three or four (Maybe five?) different posts exploring all of these ideas in a broad and complex way. As you can tell I finished none of it and decided instead to show this rather than have yet another week of no posts. I've recently started a new job and my living situation is changing so creative output has been majorly low. I hope to establish some kind of new normal soon but I have to be patient with myself so I ask if you could be patient with me as well. Thanks for reading!