u/Prestigious-Emu-6760

I'm working on an Ark inspired game for Daggerheart and while I have most of the rules down to cover things I need like tames/crafting/settlement building etc. I'm trying to work out how big the map should be.

I have 10 biomes (1 per level) which will be grouped by tiers 1-4 and I know how they function. The thing I'm running in to is how big should the map be. I want there to be plenty for the PCs to explore but also not so big that it feels daunting to try to explore it all. So nothing Isle of Dread size.

I love how easy it is to port old/classic monsters into the various Without Number games but am looking at ways to incorporate Energy Drain type creatures to simulate particularly nasty things.

My immediate thought was to apply System Strain but was also thinking of attribute lowering like with Radiation.

Anyone done this?

I think this sounds okay in my head but figured I'd float the idea to see what others thought.

We're planning an Ark inspired survival-ish Daggerheart game and one of the hurdles to cross is crafting. Making it matter and fun but also not making it tedious resource gathering and bookkeeping.

So my idea is simple - building a thing is a Project governed by a Countdown. The biome environment will have a passive feature along the lines of "The PCs can take an action to Reduce Countdown on Tier X project". So if they are in a tier 1 biome and want to build a tier 1 item they can interact with the environment to move the Countdown following standard countdown rules.

The next step is to have buildings offer a small bonus. Enough to make it worth doing (and visiting), not enough to unbalance things. My initial thoughts were along the lines of "Small House - characters who take a rest here clear one stress" or "Medical Station - characters who take a rest here clear one Hit Point" or have one to repair armor or gain hope etc.

Which I think works for what I intend but more eyes on an idea is rarely a bad thing. I just need a small number of building "types" and a way to Tier them up but I don't want to go to far down the rabbit hole if this only seems feasible to me.

Sure I know that fundamentally they're not so different from skill challenges or progress clocks but as I start to work on our Ark inspired survival game they solve a simple problem that always plagues TTRPG versions of that style of game - resource tracking.

Instead of you need X wood or Y Stone etc. my plan is to just use countdowns and as the characters take actions etc. they can progress the countdown. No resource tracking, just player action impacting the countdown and when it's finished so is the project.

Coupled with Follow the Fiction (clearly you need more material for a shack then you do a door) I think this works and is significantly better than the tedious business of gathering resources.

We're gearing up for a Daggerheart game and using the Gamemasters Guide to Collaborative Campaign Design and one of the things we're contemplating is incorporating Settlement Building/Managing.

Does anyone know of any existing material for that? If not I'm sure I can cobble together something from various books I have (likely borrow heavily from Fallout's Settler's Guide).

Edited - some great suggestion I can mine here. As we continue down the collaborative path our baseline is shaping up to be something akin to Ark with Magic.