Renegade Merchant 1: Exploration

Two weeks ago, I started running FFG's Warhammer 40k TTRPG Rogue Trader. Thirteen days and 23 hours ago, I started thinking about the inadequacies of the system.

Rogue Trader's premise is that you are a space conquistador- a free agent empowered by the empire to explore, conquer, trade. You play as the command crew of a big spaceship that is committed to exploring uncharted stars, acquiring profit, and then returning that profit to civilization. Let's take that premise and start writing a completely fresh TTRPG from the ground up. 

The gameplay loop, then, is fairly simple: 

1. Locate point of interest
2. Convert point of interest into profit
3. Refresh and repeat. 

Note: Why yes, this does rather nicely mirror the OSR hexcrawl model. I wonder if that'll come up later. 

Step 1 can happen one of three ways, broadly speaking: 

1. Players may explore onto a point of interest by simply travelling to a blank space on the map that the DM reveals to have contained something obviously interesting. "You travel north? Ah, ok... you see a giant pit full of flaming skulls."
   
   
2.  Players may have a point revealed to them by an NPC, or as part of the baseline information of the setting, or by their investigative endeavors. "Having broken the cipher, the treasure map says the treasure is buried twelve thousand steps north of the flaming skull pit beneath an elm tree."
   
   
3. Players may forge a point of interest by taking an otherwise unremarkable spot and putting stuff there. "Let's build a fort here by the mountain pass and establish an order of knights to protect the pass."

I believe a good game should include systems for all three. So let's talk about the first one: Exploration.

The most basic system for it is to have a map with pre-recorded points of interest encoded in hexes and then let the players know what they've stumbled into when the party enters the hex. In many games this is sufficient, especially when play is primarily driven by the other two location options. 

However, we can complicate it! One way we can complicate it is by providing extra information about hexes prior to their entry. For example, in a hexbased OSR game, we can tell the players the terrain type of hexes nearby, which encourages them to move towards unusual spots. We might also imagine a "locate nearby settlements" spell. This kind of "distant exploration" is important because if not every point on the map is interesting, we'd like to funnel players towards interesting ones, so they spend less time on null results. 

The other way we can complicate it is by not revealing all the information about a location just because you're there- Arriving at a castle doesn't necessarily tell you whether the inhabitants are friendly, for example, or how much treasure they have. Giving the players some tools for this kind of "close exploration" allows them to make meaningful decisions about their course of action going forward, which ties closely into Gamestage #2. 

So how will exploration work in Renegade Merchant? No clue yet, but I wanted to ground my thoughts in some overarching theory first.