Treasure Hunt - Campaign Diary: Archipelago Adventures - Pt. 34

Last time we were here I talked about going back to the story and doing a bit of work there, but first I wanted to do a small divergent and go over treasure… more specifically a Treasure Hunt with a map and everything!

But how do you make the Treasure Hunt a fun little mini-game for the players to take part in while they explore through the archipelago? If I just drew the island on the map, they could match it to whatever island they were at and just ignore it the rest of the game.

Here are a few of my ideas on it.

The Build-up

If you’ve ever played Sid Meier’s Pirates!, this mechanic will be very familiar. As the party travels and explores they can find parts of the map. This can be part of treasure hoards that other ships have, that traders are willing to sell for high prices and maybe you have to steal a piece from a snobby, rich noble. This map could be made up to 10 pieces, any more and it feels a bit too much. I think a better size might be 5 to 7 pieces. That way they can be on the look out, you can drop it in at key points in the story and they have a chance to get everything.

Now, how would the DM present this to the party? He could just wordlessly hand over the first piece and continue on like usual. Let them start guessing how many pieces there are and start asking around about it to see what more they can learn. Eventually they’ll get all the pieces of their map, or they’ll have enough pieces to guess at which island they should go to. Then its just comparing their map to the island and finding where X marks the spot.

This has the problem though of losing the player’s interest. If they only have one piece and have been unable to find more, they may just not care about it anymore and if they get more pieces, they may just assume they’ll naturally get more pieces and not look for more on their own, and if there is no catalyst to get them finding more… they may not bother.

Treasure Points

What if any island could have treasure? What if the players accumulated ‘treasure points’ or doubloons or whatever else we wanted to signify that they were getting points to be spent at a later time? If they did a big story element, they would get a few treasure points. If they find a big hoard, they would earn a few more treasure points. If they fought a pirate lord, earn a few treasure points. Now, what do they do with these points?

Well, whenever they feel like it, and are on an island, they can go off and ‘hunt for buried treasure’ on the island. They spend their points, and they have a chance of finding magic items, gold, diamonds, whatever we decide for treasure. The more points they spend, the more and better treasure they can find. Every time they hunt for treasure, they spend their points and have to go complete more of the story or conquer powerful enemies to get more points.

This has the bonus of making it so that any island could have buried treasure somewhere on it, though that is also a flaw for it. Earning ‘fake’ points that just allow you to find hidden treasure on an island doesn’t really feel realistic, but rather video-gamey. You could name them something like Pirate Sense or Missing Doubloons, but peel back the fluff and its just arbitrary points they are earning.

The Side Quest

What if it was a side quest that the players could choose to take on, that was more direct. A rowboat with a dead person on board has a map of an island with a big red X on it. The party can decide to take an interest in it and find a journal on the body detailing the person’s attempts to find the treasure, and the corpse thought that the island was very close.

The player’s can then roll on the Island Coordinates Chart to determine where the treasure island is, and then journey there and spend a day digging around for treasure. We could even make a minigame out of hunting through the island. The players would have to make Survival checks as they scour the island, and the result would give them a number of chances to find the hidden treasure. They’d have to use their skills smartly as they move through the island until they find the treasure and then realize they have no shovels.

Of course, this makes the buried treasure just a small side quest that will last for 2 hours and then be forgotten. Doesn’t quite have the dramatic search that we would hope for.

If I Had To Pick One

Now, for our game I’m going to have to pick one and go with it, and I’m going to go with all of them. I’m going to combine them into another idea. A treasure hunt should be dramatic, but once they have all the pieces they are going to want to get their treasure… but they have to know where they should go.

The Treasure Hunt

The party finds a journal, and in it is a small word puzzle, pages on finding a treasure and several torn out pages. Reading through the pages that remain, you can learn that the book details an island with a hidden treasure. The writer of the journal had stumbled upon after getting ship wrecked there and realized his luck, the only problem was that he wasn’t capable enough on his own to get the goods, so he built a raft and sailed out into the archipelago.

Unfortunately, it looks like the owner of the journal is dead and someone else came along and stole the maps out of the back of the journal, along with the coordinates for the island. The players will have to be on the lookout for whoever has the missing pages, 4 in total, and then locate this island.

These pages could be hidden with a hobgoblin general, a pirate lord, a merchant might have one for sale and a rich noble in Nepu-Nepu may have a piece and be unwilling to part with it unless the party agrees to do a quest or take the noble along with them along with a retinue of guards and retainers so that the noble can claim his fair share (50% of course). These pages should be revealed as the party earns them through completing the story or battling powerful enemies, but instead of the players earning ‘points’ the GM is in charge of making sure that the pages wind up in their hands.

Upon finding the island, they set off in search of treasure. Obviously it’s not so easy as finding the X on the map, for the treasure is hidden in an underground vault protected by the spirits of whoever gathered the treasure in the first place. Getting their way through the puzzles and encounters, they arrive at the final room and find it… empty. Everything cleared out, though the rather insightful characters will realize that the stone work on the ground is laid out in a peculiar fashion, almost as if depicting a massive X on the floor.

Hopefully a character or player realizes the implications and they must dig at this X, destroy the stone work and find that the treasure vault was hidden below the floor itself. We can throw in magical items fit for this campaign along with gold, platinum, crowns, necklaces and more treasure! Of course, the noble isn’t content to let the characters keep their portion of the treasure and will fight them every step of the way as they try to leave the island with their hoard and now they must cling to it!

Now, this does have the problem of the players having to find pages, and may not care to continue investigating and that’s their right. The adventurers will find the journal and the GM should only have 1 or 2 ‘appear’ in their hands and the party should hear rumors about where the other pages are. They have to guide the story in that direction.

Your Opinion May Differ

Now, that is just my opinion of what would make an exciting treasure hunt, but yours may differ. Maybe that is too much and you just want a simple island. Maybe the idea of treasure checkpoints is more appealing and it makes it easier to run hidden treasure. I’d love to hear your ideas and next week, I promise, we are back to the story! Unless I get distracted by something else!