Barbarian Prince is one of my favorite games -- one of the best solo hexcrawl games of all time. I've never encountered a more emergent gaming experience. You could play it 10 times and not have the same end. One time my barbarian prince died in the desert of privation just after his wife and horses. If you're ever interested in checking it out, it can be downloaded for free from Boardgamegeek.
Why am I talking about a 44 year old obscure pocket game? It influenced my early roleplaying game experience -- taking the ideas of fully emergent gaming and applying it to a game we barely understood.
River Crossing Encounter Tables
One of the random tables I loved (okay...sometimes hated) in Barbarian Prince was the River Crossing table. Your game could turn every time you crossed a river -- giving you a chance to jump on a riverboat and move quickly to a settlement, or encounter a bear and end your session really quickly.
This is my version of the River Crossing Table for the Zherovain Highlands. You might find a waterlogged pouch full of gold or have a Crystalline Worm explode from the riverbank and snatch a horse or two. Or you might find an old watchtower at a ford.
Witch-Lords of Skull Mountain Issue #1
Our #zinequest crowdfunding campaign over at Kickstarter has funded and we are quickly approaching our final stretch goal -- a detached cover with a full map on the inside.
Witch-Lords of Skull Mountain is an emergent setting in three different game systems: DCC RPG, Shadowdark, and Old School Essentials / BX (making it compatible with any OSR system).
If it interests you, run on over to Kickstarter and show your support. I promise it'll have enough detail to lighten your DM/Judge/GM load, enough open-ended content to allow you to improvise the blanks, and provide many hours of gaming for your gaming-starved players.
Below is a preview of our River Crossing table, an encounter, discovery, and events table when characters cross one of the many rivers and streams that crisscross the Zherovain Steppes.