"Black Dougal gasps 'Poison!' and falls to the floor. He looks dead."

Sunday, March 10, 2013

Wilderness Hex Stocking

I am currently stocking a wilderness hex map. It is 20 hexes by 20 hexes numbered 0 to 19 in each direction.

I have mentioned in the past that I stock wilderness hexes in the same manner as I stock dungeon rooms. Each hex is treated as a "room" and I roll on the table in section E "Stock the Dungeon" on page B52.

Instead of rolling 400 d6's I set up a simple random number generator in each cell of a 20 by 20 cell spreadsheet in excel with a vlookup function that referred to a table that matched the one on page B52.

Below are the very high level contents of my 400 hexes:

7 comments:

  1. Great tool! Can you share the Spread sheet or the Vlook formula?

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  2. Cells A1 to B6 put a version of the table on page B52 so it looks sort of like this:

    1 | Monster
    2 | Monster
    3 | Trap/Obstacle
    4 | Special
    5 | Empty
    6 | Empty

    Then in all of the cells that represent you hexes put the formula:
    =vlookup(randbetween(1,6),$A$1:$B$6,2,false)

    That should do it.

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    Replies
    1. Beautiful, thanks very much for sharing! I think I see an entire hexploration spread sheet construction in the near future!

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  3. Thanks for the idea, it certainly will make hex stocking easier if I get the formula to work. I keep getting an NA error in the target cell and when I run help its the randbetween that is causing the error? how do I change the number it looks up into text monster/special etc in the new cell?

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  4. if you put:
    =randbetween(1,6)
    into a cell, will it give you a number?

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  5. Aye the randbetween bit works fine on its own, but when combined with vlookup, it doesn't do owt but error?

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  6. Sorry, I don't know what would be causing that.

    So long as the "$A$1:$B$6" references the table, the randbetween should generate a number from 1 to 6 and the vlookup should look up the random number in the first column of the table and return the corresponding result from the second column.

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