Rogue-likes & Hexcrawls

[violence in the media]

So, I've mentioned before that I've been playing a lot of rogue-likes recently (chiefly DC:SS, Angband, & Zorbus) and I've been thinking and reading about the West Marches style hexcrawl again. Those sorts of dungeon crawls are fun; but I've been wanting to play something more open world and sandboxy lately, without having to find a group and organize schedules. Is there any game out there that simulates or recreates that sort of hexcrawl experience, with the rogue-like qualities of everything being randomized and different every time you start a new game?

My uninformed opinion is that you'd want a game that had:

Hexes and the contents therein persist once they'd been discovered/generated, but that wasn't linked to the survival of any particular character. So, unlike a normal dungeon crawl, you don't have to start all over from scratch when your character dies.

A stable of characters that you'd form adventuring parties from, and that you could recruit new ones to replace characters as necessary. Maybe there would be some aspect to that part of the game where it could end if you ran out of adventurers to form parties with.

An encounter system that wasn't all "monsters attack!" You should be able to have encounters with creatures where you can negotiate, trade, or recruit. Or have environmental encounters, like a sandstorm in the desert, heavy rains in springtime, or the need to ford a river or something.

Navigating and dealing with hazards in the hexes should be as much a part of the game as fighting bugbears or ghosts in the ruined castle you just found. So you need supplies and characters with different abilities and such.

A leveling system for your characters, so they can become more powerful and explore more dangerous locales.

Maybe as a bonus, have the game able to randomly pre-generate a small hex-world already populated with locations, monsters, encounters that you can export and use for a tabletop game. Not the mechanics, obviously, but just knowing things that there is a tower full of ghouls 3 hexes west of your home town and that there are giants to the south would be useful. Hexcrawl-in-a-can for lazy DMs.

So, does anyone know of a game like this? Or any reason why someone hasn't made one?

[angelfromanotherpin]

Thea: the Awakening isn't too far off.

[Shiritai]

Dwarf Fortress: Adventure Mode?

[violence in the media]

Thea's been on my GOG wishlist for a while, but the card combat system isn't very appealing and that guy's review didn't do the game any favors, unfortunately. Plus, the game seems to have a larger story behind it that you inevitably progress towards. I liked how in GTA you could ignore the main storyline mission and still have tons of mayhem to run around and get up to.

I've looked at Dwarf Fortress too, but that game just seems to be...too much.

Thanks for the suggestions though.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

Dwarf Fortress is really what you're looking for. The learning curve isn't as steep as it used to be and there's more tilepacks out there than ever. Apparently they've even added party mechanics recently. If you really get into it, then you can start adding the Playable tag to weirdo races like giant beetles and shit. Yeah, it's complicated to learn, but I don't know how easy you expected "roguelike + hexcrawl" to be to learn.

[OgreBattle]

Brigandine on the PSX is kinda like that but heavy tactical combat instead of dungeon exploration. Also the land is set but special events in different territories are random.

Fallout 1-2 is also similar but not randomly generated for the core story path

[Pariah Dog]

John Wick Hex, is a kinda hybrid of turn based and real time hex crawl. Still an epic exlusive (boo) but the one year mark is coming up.

[JonSetanta]

There's an XBOX top-down class-based but instead of levels you purchase abilities with gold...

Hammerwatch

Bit of class imbalance, such as the glass cannons Assassin and nearly unkillable Paladin.

https://www.google.com/search?client=fi ... lite.1.0l5