Cook the Chaos | The Destination

If the party reaches its destination, whether that’s, say, The Town, The Deep, The Woods, The Ruins, or The Caverns, remember your exploration loop, where if you need it to, time narrows into 10 minute intervals within what might be a hostile environment.

What will the party discover during that exploration? Hopefully during the trek through The Wilderness to get here, you’ll have had time and unearthed enough from what’s happened or what the player(s) have been talking about, to imagine up something connected to that, something that makes sense, something that relates to the rumour or job the player(s) started out with.

Plug & play other modules

If not, feel free to slot in a module or adventure from another game, moulding it around the rumour or job, adapting any creatures or loot, and so on, to the simple rules and chaos of this game. If you’re converting a creature from another game, for example, you’ll know its description, so just quickly roll up its max health, to hit, damage, and armour mods, as well as its grit score, each based on how easy, hard or oh boy dangery danger it seems in the other game.

Point crawl it

Scratch up 5 quick locations here that matter (rooms, points of interest, structures). Draw lines between them all, connecting some, creating various routes to get to each location. For each line, think of a decision the party will need to make (shortcuts, blocked paths, water features, twists & turns & dead ends, traps, secret doors). Then lead the party through the exploration loop, creating as you go.

Create on the fly or prepare in advance

Don’t put too much pressure on yourself, though. If you feel ok to generate creatures and encounters in real-time, go for it. If you’d prefer to prepare before the session, go for it. It’s your game, and whatever level of preparation you need is exactly the amount you should use. So maybe ahead of a session, if the player(s) have said which rumour or job they fancy checking out, make some watch rolls in advance and think them through, and for the destination, either flick through the module you’d like to plug in, or prepare a point crawl using any random encounter decks or tables or resources you can get your hands on, thinking a little about what’s maybe going on at the destination, without of course having in mind what actually ends up unfurling during the session.

Breathe life into the setting

You’re thinking, therefore, more about creating a setting, stocking its locations with creatures, with factions and their motivations, with traps, loot, intrigue, decision points, connecting your locations until they start to foreshadow and reveal their purpose. Where the character(s) end up going in your setting, how they explore and move between its locations, or what and how they deal with the conflicts presented there, is entirely up to the player(s). But as they explore, with your exploration loops you can bring the place alive, with wandering creatures and NPCs who don’t just wait at locations until the party arrives, who react to the party’s presence or to other factions and happenings within the setting that might be completely unrelated to the party until it gets in the way. You might fear the unknown in the setting you create, but imagine what the player(s) feel as they peer around the next corner!

what's next?

Ok, so from here you might want to...

...return to the cook the chaos intro

...or double check the rules of the chaos

Remember, though, that you can navigate anywhere on the site using the menus on each page, and if you ever get lost, roll 1d6 and we'll see what perils you encounter!