Exploring the Barrow Mounds: Overland Exploration in Barrowmaze

Note: If you like the maps provided in this article, I have also made cleaned-up digital versions in a follow-up post here!

Barrowmaze is a great adventure. It drips with old-school flavor, undead, and a labyrinthine dungeon rivaled by few other products. I love Barrowmaze, and I love running it. Those of you who read my revisions of the Village of Hommlet will remember that I used Barrowmaze as the Temple of Elemental Evil in that module.

However, as much as I love Barrowmaze, it provides amorphous procedures for the players to explore the surface of the barrow mounds. Its lackadaisical attitude towards exploring the surface of the barrow mounds is a missed opportunity, I think. 

Last year at the Alexandrian, Justin Alexander made a post about the importance of clear structures and procedures when running games. Therefore, I thought I would parse through the information available and offer some resources to provide better structure and make life easier for my fellow referees running Barrowmaze.

First, a survey of the resources available.

In the section titled “Running Barrowmaze,” Greg Gillespie mostly focuses on underground exploration. For above-ground exploration, there are high- and low-level random encounter tables for the barrow mounds, divided again into day and night. Greg says the mounds are “ancient, damp, and obscured by mist.” He also provides an overland map of the mounds divided into 50ft. hexes and a description of the different kinds of entrances to the mounds themselves.

That is all.

Second, we will look at the rules system. Because Barrowmaze is written for compatibility with Labyrinth Lord, I will focus on Labyrinth Lord. The same rules still apply for Old School Essentials, however, as both Labyrinth Lord and Old School Essentials are B/X compatible. According to the rules:

·         Player characters have a “turn movement” from 30’ to 120’ (depending on encumbrance), representing how far they can carefully explore in ten minutes.

·         This movement speed accounts for exploring, watching their footing, mapping, and taking care to avoid obstacles.

·         This movement rate is equal to feet when in a dungeon (underground) and equal to yards during overland (above ground) exploration.

·         The speed of the adventuring party is equal to the speed of its slowest member.

·         When moving through previously explored areas, the referee may allow player characters to move at a rate equal to three times their movement speed.

·         The referee should check for random encounters once every twenty minutes of in-game time. A random encounter occurs with a 1-in-6 chance. (Fun fact: Greg Gillespie himself chimed in on the nature of random encounters in Barrowmaze in this forum post).

All these rules mean, when the party is exploring the surface of the barrow mounds, the referee should measure time in ten-minute turns. An adventuring party can move between 30 and 120 yards per turn when exploring new hexes and between 90 and 360 yards per turn when traversing previously explored hexes. The referee should check for random encounters every other turn, and again when the player characters do something to attract monsters (such as opening a sealed mound entrance).

Given what I’ve described above, I think most referees who run Barrowmaze attempt to use the 50ft. hex overland map and the overland exploration rules of Labyrinth Lord or Old School Essentials. I did the same when I first began running Barrowmaze However, this approach results in several problems.

First, the overland travel rules of Labyrinth Lord and Old School Essentials don’t divide evenly into 50ft, making it difficult to track how far and fast the party has moved.

Furthermore, tracking time in 50ft. hexes is overly granular when the party can move 90-360ft. per ten-minute turn. Asking the party which hex they go to over and over again is boring – a problem exacerbated when the players are making a map for themselves, as the greater quantity of hexes increases the likelihood of a mistake in transcription.

The rules-as-written also don’t specify how far the party can see, either. And the irregular distances between the barrow mounds stymies running overland exploration of the barrow mounds as a point crawl.

After one session of trying to track distance in 50ft. hexes and use Roll20’s fog of war tool to reveal terrain as the players explored, I knew I needed to try something else.

The solution I arrived at was to make a new map with 30 yard hexes. Because of the units LL and OSE use track overland travel speed, the smallest measurement you would use during overland exploration would be 30 yards, or 90 feet. This means 30-yard (or 90ft.) hexes would be far more useful than 50ft hexes, in my opinion.

One hex is thirty yards across. The number of the barrow is included in relevant hexes, next to "P" for plundered, "S" for sealed, "COV" for covered, and "COL" for collapsed. The green represents the moor, while the gray-brown denotes the bona fide swampland.

  So I took the Barrowmaze 50ft. hex map and converted it into 90ft. hexes. There are several cool results from doing this:

·         Because no two barrow entrances are immediately adjacent to one another on Greg Gillespie’s map, a single barrow entrance fits into each hex nicely

·         When printed on a letter-sized sheet of paper, the larger hexes give me room to label the type of entrance (plundered, sealed, etc.) with the number of the mound. When running Barrowmaze in the past, I often had to spend unnecessary time staring at my referee map to ensure I read the correct entrance number (and have even made some mistakes, with adverse consequences).

·         I’m also able to number the hexes themselves, which will aid in player mapping of the barrow mounds. I can clearly communicate to the players which hex their characters are in, and they can tell me which they plan on traveling to.

Given the fog in the barrow mounds, I think it’s fair to say the player characters can see clearly into each other 30-yard hex around them, but no further. This means player characters can see barrow mound entrances from one hex away. 

For example, players emerging from mound #17 might ask me what they see when they look around. "You see a mound to the north," I would say. "It looks like it's still sealed. There's another to the south, as well, but the open entrance and tracks around it indicate it's been plundered."

Furthermore, the Pathfinder RPG (which is the system I used to run, back in the day) lists the maximum encounter distance in a swamp as being 2d8x10ft. On average, this is equal to… 90ft! Exactly the distance from the center of one 30-yard hex to the center of another.

Some might argue that player characters should have to devote extra time to search for the mound entrances, or perhaps have a chance to not find them. I object to this approach for three reasons:

·         The slow travel speed for traversing new hexes assumes the player characters are exploring and searching.

·         This forum post makes a case that experienced adventurers would be able to know a barrow mound when they see one.

·         It is a lot more fun to find adventure than to miss it.

This is a blank version of the Barrowmaze map above. You can give this to your players to complete as they explore.

In summary, here are the rules and procedures I recommend for running overland exploration of the barrow mounds from Barrowmaze.

·         Give the players a blank numbered hex map (pictured above). One or more mappers can track what they find and where.

·         Player characters can explore 1-4 new hexes or traverse 3-12 explored hexes per 10-minute turn, depending on the encumbrance of the party’s slowest member.

·         Track explored hexes with tally marks. New hexes count as three, explored hexes count as one, and advance turns when the party has exceeded their allotted amount (3 for a movement speed of 30 and 12 for a movement speed of 120).

·         Check for a random encounter every other turn. On a result of 1-in-6, roll using the barrow mound random encounter table (accounting for the time of day).

·         If players ask, describe to them what they can see in adjacent hexes – including mound entrances.

·         You as the referee may wish to add random occurrences, discoveries, or set dressing to the barrow mounds and fill in “empty” hexes.

And that is all! I hope this helps any referees out there running Barrowmaze.