I've been running a Sunday night 5e game over Zoom for the last couple months. I decided I wanted to promote exploration and emphasize the weirder aspects of D&D. Enter... The Sea of Worlds. The setting is a reimagined Inner Planes, specifically the point where the Elemental Plane of Air meets the Elemental Plane of Water.
Instead of repeating myself, here's the player document I made on the Homebrewery that explains the setting.
(The landscape on the first page is a wallpaper I found on google. The character illustrations are by me.)
The party started out as the crew of a ship whose captain just died. They were left with the ship, a debt and some leads on making money. The core system of play was intended to be the party sailing around, trading goods and exploring weird islands. To make things spicier, I decided that the sea would actually change over time.
The Wild Sea
Spinward of Firma is the Wild Sea, the source of Raw Chaos. The sea is not yet fixed in place, if it is not observed it begins to change. Islands move, appear, disappear and even drift in from possible worlds. They can be filled with both riches and danger. Settled Islands will become fixed, but the distance and seas between them can change as the world roils.
I bought a deck of blank hex cards and drew a bunch of islands on them. When the party travels, I draw cards from the deck to see where the party has ended up. Then they have a random encounter and can decide whether to explore the island or keep moving. If the party takes a long rest outside of a settlement, I gather up the tiles and shuffle them. The tiles are also shuffled every few weeks game-time if the party is in the main city during the Sequestering (everyone looks away from the ocean for a night, so the are stays chaotic.) It's been working out... OK.
What I Did Wrong:
My main error was making the whole ocean out of the random hexes. This incentivizes the party to pop in and out of settlements to try and get the map reset so their destination pops up closer to them. It has also made how exactly the map reset works confusing to both the players and me. Since I didn't think it through enough I'm spinning plates a little to keep it fun and support the design goals. Those goals being to make exploring unpredictable, promote travel, and make the players think carefully about whether to take a long rest.
If I were to do this again (and I will because when you order a stack of hex cards they give you quite a lot,) I'd have major settled islands and the routes between them fixed on a larger map, with random areas of ocean that the party can try to take a shortcut through or explore in for adventure. Then it's more of a decision of the players to deal with the random ocean, rather than an obligation. (Though lots of adventures will require setting off into the unknown.) The setting would also be a little more rational too.
Next time: I'll take a little about the group and their adventures and share some more things I did wrong and how I would do things over if I had the chance.
