Hex crawl resources

[Dr_Noface]

I find "hex crawl" books like Yoon-Suin very fun to read through. Does anyone have any recommendations for this kind of thing?

[Blicero]

Are you asking for examples of other hexcrawls, or for advice on how to make a hexcrawl setting?

If it's the former, LotFP has done stuff like Qelong, Better than Any Man, and Weird New World. I guess there is also Pathfinder's Kingmaker AP. There's that Ancient Kingdoms: Mesopotamia book I OSSR'd a bit back, although that is more of a pointcrawl. Presumably there are a lot more out there, since hexcrawls have been back in vogue for more than half a decade at this point.

If it is the latter, googling "hexcrawl" brings up a slew of tutorials and the like. ACKS has advice as well.

[Dr_Noface]

To clarify, asking more about content and big ol lists of things.

[OgreBattle]

The RIFTS world books are interesting reads and if I recall correctly they often have tables for random encounters.

[Krusk]

Just wrapped up a year long hexcrawl.

Answer is not really. After i populated with what i thought were enough cool adventures, we ran a session and i realized i needed at least 3x. From there, What worked best for me was to just buy a ton of monster manuals from various 3.5, pathfinder, and 3rd party places and use the good monsters. Tag the good ones and then do quick generic 2 sentance plots on each one of them based on random hex placement. Then get good at winging encounters.

I had probably like 200 legit encounters over 800 hexes. Probably another 300 lame encounters and then random event charts.

A lot of hex advice out there is "just prep like 20 adventures and put then sequentially in whatever hexes they go to". But thats shitty and means their choice to check out the forest over the swamp doesnt actually matter.

Other advice i saw was one enounter per 5 hexes. In my experience you want way closer to like, 1 per 2 or more.

You also need mundane crap to fill in empty hexes. Ex if you dig here you can find a vein of iron. Or you find a small grove of apple trees around the bend. To let the players care about the territory. you should have some sort of info like this for each hex, and you should probably randomly generate t ahead of time, and then modify so it kind of makes sense. Civ 5 actually gave a good start for me on doing this with their map maker.

[Chamomile]

800 hexes is madness. A 6x6 hex crawl is your minimum. A 10x10 is probably wise to shoot for, particularly if it's your first time. A 15x15 is pushing the limits of good sense. 800 hexes is four times that size.

[Antariuk]

The Alexandrian - Hexcrawl
Justin Alexander has written a bunch of laughingly weird things about D&D, but I like this column enough. He's going way overboard in terms of detail, but it's a nice and structured approach to the whole topic and I stole a few ideas for my own hexcrawl game (e.g. adding a percentile chance to every encounter to determine if it's face-to-face, tracks, or a lair. This way you populate hexes with minor sites over time without any additional prep work).

Welshpiper - Hex-bases Campaign Design
A very compact take on the hexcrawl idea, but it also gives an example on how to manually roll up a hexcrawl world. The encounter types in the second part are pretty good for a standard setting and allow you to start seeding content right away.

Steamtunnel - In Praise of the 6-Mile Hex
I like hexes to be 6 miles across, for reasons listed in this article and also because it correlates nicely with overland movement rates in d20 games, especially for difficult terrain. It's also a middle ground in terms of manageability and game speed since I think 12-mile hexes are way to big (they cover almost 125 square miles and that's enough space to run entire games in) and you'd need to abstract even more, let alone how long it takes to fully explore one such hex.

Tony Dowler - How to host a Dungeon
This isn't hexcrawl content per se, but it adds nicely to randomly generated content. In short, this is a mini game for you as Mister Cavern to see how a specific dungeon came into being, who's occupying it now and what's in there. The game goes through several ages like in a RTS game, and it's fun enough to run it 2-3 times just to see what you end up with.

[Krusk]

800 hexes is madness. A 6x6 hex crawl is your minimum. A 10x10 is probably wise to shoot for, particularly if it's your first time. A 15x15 is pushing the limits of good sense. 800 hexes is four times that size.

Thats also probably good advice.

[hogarth]

The Alexandrian - Hexcrawl
Justin Alexander has written a bunch of laughingly weird things about D&D, but I like this column enough.

I like how he says "make sure everything you include is awesome because life is too short to waste time on the mediocre or the “good enough”" and then his example of an encounter is a wyvern sitting in a cave with 7,000 silver pieces. It doesn't get any more awesome than that!

[Chamomile]

On a tangential note: It's generally true that you should avoid padding something out with mediocre content to make it longer. Small hexcrawl dense with interesting content is better than large hexcrawl dense with meh content and a few interesting things, even if the amount of interesting content is the same in an absolute sense. But look, GM is a volunteer position and editing out the mediocre is often twice the work of drafting in the first place, so I wouldn't worry too much about it.

[Blicero]

I like how he says "make sure everything you include is awesome because life is too short to waste time on the mediocre or the “good enough”" and then his example of an encounter is a wyvern sitting in a cave with 7,000 silver pieces. It doesn't get any more awesome than that!

He notes that the wyvern example is from his actual campaign key. In the same post where he says to be awesome, he also notes that he trusts his improv skills enough to not need to specify every detail when doing his own campaign preparation. So writing down "wyvern in room" might be sufficient for him. I realize that reading more than a sentence or two of something is difficult, but you should consider doing it more often.

[PhoneLobster]

I realize that reading more than a sentence or two of something is difficult, but you should consider doing it more often.

While I haven't read what you are talking about, nor do I care to, nothing in your description of it in any way defends or justifies the gap between "make interesting content" and "for example, put a wyvern... IN. A. ROOM. But that's not all. Also give it some cash."

So before telling people to read more just in case their shallow reading leads to mistaken conclusions try to actually give an example from the additional text that actually demonstrates that their conclusions are mistaken rather than just alternating between being irrelevant and simply reinforcing those conclusions.

And really, I don't care what's in the actual original content, your defense of it was bad, bad enough that I felt like pointing it out in passing on a point I'm largely disinterested in, on a topic I'm largely disinterested in.

While I'm on the point of not being that interested in the topic, seriously. Hex crawl as outdoor campaign design/mapping? What is this? The fucking 1900s just rang, they want their shitty OSR maps back.

[Blicero]

While I haven't read what you are talking about, nor do I care to, nothing in your description of it in any way defends or justifies the gap between "make interesting content" and "for example, put a wyvern... IN. A. ROOM. But that's not all. Also give it some cash."

So before telling people to read more just in case their shallow reading leads to mistaken conclusions try to actually give an example from the additional text that actually demonstrates that their conclusions are mistaken rather than just alternating between being irrelevant and simply reinforcing those conclusions.

And really, I don't care what's in the actual original content, your defense of it was bad, bad enough that I felt like pointing it out in passing on a point I'm largely disinterested in, on a topic I'm largely disinterested in.

Aha, but here is where the part where you didn't read the link bites you in the ass. The actual sequence is:

1. He talks about the "four documents" you need to have a hexcrawl, one of which is a hex key. An example from his hex key is the infamous "cave with wyvern in".

2. A full month later, he gives advice on how other people might fill their hexes up. It is in this post that he gives the "be awesome" advice. It is also in this post that he mentions that, for his own campaign's prep, he does not need to give as much detail as he would were he prepping the material for general release.


So it's not "be awesome; by the way an example of being awesome is 'cave with wyvern in'", it's "from my (sparse) map key, here is a cave with a wyvern in it......... When you are making your own key, you should include as much detail as you need to ensure that the result is awesome".

[PhoneLobster]

You still aren't describing or quoting material that defends your claim. You are STILL just decribing the same original contradiction between vague awesome content and actual lame examples of wyverns on an abstract plane.