March's Book-Blog: Multipolar Hexes, a quick trick inspired by Christoph N. Vogel's Conflict Minerals Inc.: War, Profit and White Saviourism in Eastern Congo

 Both a necessary antidote to the conventional wisdom of consumer-focussed technocratic interventionism in the DRC and a dense mass with little readability for at least this non-specialist,  I don't find I have much to say about Conflict Minerals Inc. It taught me a lot of stuff I didn't know before. On the other hand, most of that isn't stuff I'd be particularly comfortable gamifying for popular consumption; for deeper thought from somebody with much more knowledge of the issues, see this post. So instead here's a brief little trick it inspired me to come up with, virtually setting-agnostic except that it needs a hex-map.


The book includes a lot of maps of factional control in particular years, like this:


Each then has a key with scores to hundreds of groups listed in (very) brief.

This kind of massive overlap between factions, with several sometimes overlapping in one area (more if you were also to try to map the power of the state) hasn't been adequately addressed in any hex-map system I've seen. A few try to make encounters contingent on surrounding hexes and their controlling factions; this works, but militates against a certain degree of granularity.

Solution: numbered vertex keying


The 1-6 numbering is actually implicit; which is to say, you know you always count clockwise from top, 1-6. The ACTUAL numbering is like this:


Which then links to a key where you find out 11 (the dominant faction, because it's got the highest chance of being generated on any given fair roll in the hex) is the Slavering Lich-Goblins of Kesh, 13 (their nearest rival) is the Archaean Junta, and 6 is the small yet potent Campaign For Legalized Chaos Sorcery. 

Write the links on in pencil and you have an easy way to track changing political affiliations. KEY PRINCIPLE: A vertex is never empty. When the PCs remove a faction, something takes its place, usually the faction that dealt the defeat (needs to be a full faction, so PCs need retainers) or the dominant one if no replacement effort is made.

Solution 1: Slightly political games

Use a normal random encounter chart; when it generates an encounter with an intelligent social creature or a product of such creatures, roll a D6 to select which vertex of the hex it's affiliated with. Degree of affiliation depends on the creature's normal nature.

Solution 2: Heavily political games

To generate a random encounter, roll D20:

1 - First vertex, strongly affiliated
2 - First vertex, loosely affiliated
[Repeat up to]
12 - Sixth vertex, loosely affiliated
13-17 - Two vertices in conflict - roll 2D12. On a double, the conflict is internecine. Encounters between 3+ factions are rare, and only occur if an ongoing random encounter draws in another by noise etc.
18-20 - Terrain, animals, weather, independents and whatever other non-aligned elements

Each of these has their own nested random encounter table. Or, the 'loosely affiliated' table could be a single one flavoured to its aligned faction and only the 'strongly affiliated' option varies.

As always, if you try this out let me know how it goes. Alas, I'm not running a hexcrawl right now. And maybe take some time to learn something about the Congo that isn't filtered through the hegemonic conflict-minerals lens.

Farewell,

Jago




Also Finished Reading for Pleasure in March: Terry Pratchett, Night Watch (reread); Seth Dickinson, The Monster Baru Cormorant
Also Reading for Pleasure in March: Matthew C. Klein and Martin Pettis, Trade Wars are Class Wars: How Rising Inequality Distorts the Global Economy and Threatens International Peace; Charlotte Wrigley, Earth, Ice, Bone, Blood: Permafrost and Extinction in the Russian Arctic; Jobe Bittmann, The Book of Antitheses: Treatise on the Ritual, Theory, and Practice of Game Magick Including Ceremonial Dice Magick, Demonic acts, Astral Travel, Divination, and the Secret Language of Symbols ('pleasure' is a very strong word in the latter case) 
'Next' month: As long promised, Ármann Jakobsson, The Troll Inside You: Paranormal Activity in the Medieval North

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