Hexcrawling and its Fundamental Use in Old School DnD Part 2

Second in my series on the hexcrawl campaign in DnD.  See the first post here.

So, most people know that the premise of the hexcrawl is pretty much a central and fundamental factor in a "sandbox" style campaign.  The sandbox being, a world within which your PCs are free to explore, plunder, and do with as they wish at their own discretion.  Now, I could go on in another entire direction here discussing the elements of the sandbox as a whole, but right now I'm just focusing on the fundamentals of a hexcrawl and the basic elements to start one.

There are hundreds of posts on forums and blogs that go into much greater detail into the fine art of designing a hexcrawl and world building than what I will offer up here.  Rob Conley, for example, has a fantastic series of posts going in depth on world building and designing your hexcrawl campaign worlds.  Even if you don't plan on using his method, I'd still highly recommend having a read through because there is a ton of valuable information in those posts.  There are others as well to be sure, and chances are if you're reading this, you have your own ideas of the best ways to go about designing a hexcrawl.  By no means is the method I am suggesting, or the advice I am offering the ONLY way to design such, it's just MY way of doing so.  It works for me.  Maybe it will work for you as well.

As I noted in my first entry, the first step is to draw a map.  Sounds pretty simple.  If you're like me, however, designing great maps can be frustrating.  I've drawn hundreds over the years, and never seem satisfied with the results.  There are all sorts of theories that go behind world building and terrain placement relative to regions, etc.  I'm just going to keep things simple for this exercise.  You might opt to sketch out a rough drawing of your map on a scrap piece of paper beforehand, or maybe you just want to wing it.  Both have their advantages and disadvantages.  I'm going to focus on designing the hexcrawl using the least amount of effort initially.  If you're like me, you already have a busy life, and while designing campaign worlds is a great way to spend your time as a hobby, you don't want to spend countless hours on world building and writing up histories and details about far away and distant lands your PCs might never encounter.  One basic rule of campaign design for me: focus on the immediate areas/regions my PCs will be engaged in prior to each session.

So, let's get right down to business then.  The first step is to get the initial hex map ready for where you're going to start the campaign.  You can either print a blank one out and draw in the details yourself, or use a program like hexographer to do it on the computer. In this exercise I'm going to just use hexographer.  Now, mind you, it will take some time playing around with this to get the full use of the program, but the free version is an excellent utility for mapmaking and comes highly recommended.

In the first step, we'll start out very basic here.  Enough to get your wheels turning and start getting you ready for that first session.  Whether you printed off a map, or are using hexographer, or any other utility, you always want to start your mapping for the campaign from the center most hex.  This way, as your players explore in whatever directions they might choose, you have plenty of room to go in and add features to your already existing map.

To make things simple, let's simply start out with 7 hexes, with each hex equal to 6 miles.  One center hex, and 6 surrounding hexes.

7 starting hexes

 In the above picture we have the central hex with the 6 surrounding hexes with grassland hills, a light forest, and a forested hills, with a river, which forks, running down the center.  Now, that we've placed our basic terrain features we need to determine what exactly are in these hexes that our adventurers are going to want to explore?  So, let's start by adding 4 basic features to the map.  A starting village (in the center hex), a ruin, a tower, and a monster lair.  Fairly basic components just to give you the idea.

Our original hexes with some areas for the PCs to explore

In the center hex, we have the village of Windholm, which sits along the river, as well as a set of ruins not far away, a monster lair in the forested hills, and a tower of some sort in the grassy hills to the south.  So already you have 4 areas for your PCs to explore, although they'll certainly focus on the 3 areas most ripe for adventure outside the starting village.  Jot down the hex number on a piece of paper, or word document and write a brief description of that hex's details.  For example:

04.04 Windholm - Small fishing village located along the Southling River.  Population 80.  Ruled by a town council of elders led by Sumerus Halfhand (LG hf9)

Of course, the above is simply an example.  You want to write out as much detail as possible in your notes.  You might want to consider drawing a map of the village, or just doing a short write-up of the major locations your PCs are likely to encounter (inns, taverns, etc.) and the NPCs they are likely to interact with.  No need to get too crazy with the details though.  It doesn't matter if Farmer Goldenwheat has a bag of 10 silver pieces hidden under a hay pile in the barn.  These things are simply filler and can be made up in the game as you go.  Focus on the important stuff, and go from there.

In the next post, I'll talk about fleshing out the areas for your party to explore, getting them to learn about the areas, and a bit about traveling to them.

Hexcrawling and its Fundamental Use in Old School D&D Part 1

The first in a series of posts whereby I discuss the merits of the old school hexcrawl.

In new school era games (3e, 3.5, 4e, etc.) when PCs are expected to travel long distances to get to their next destination, it might be typical for a DM to say "after a week long travel you all arrive at 'destination x,' subtract a week's rations," for the sake of "moving the story along."  That's fine and dandy and all, and maybe the players want that at times, but let's face it, in a world of medieval/weird/apocalyptic fantasy, "getting there" is half the battle.  That's the difference between the old school game and the new school era, video game centric scaled "encounters" in modern RPGs.  In the old school, it's not always about the destination, but more about the journey.  After all, in a fantastic setting peopled with monsters and magic, all kind of things can happen when the PCs are moving through the wilderness, even if they take a populated and well traveled road.

In my present game, it won't be long before the party gets a clue to what will likely be their next destination, should they follow that path of course.  They could certainly choose to ignore it, but most likely they won't.  As such, the journey will take them almost a month, on horseback, even if they take the main road.  In a world of fantasy, a lot can happen in a month's time.  So, in essence, they'll be doing some hexcrawling for a while.  Maybe even a few entire game sessions.  A lot can happen on the way to town.

Hexcrawling has been covered in great detail all over the OSR blogging world.  There is already a wealth of information on the subject.  While some may argue semantics, at its heart hexcrawling is similar to dungeon crawling, except the "crawl" takes place above ground, often in wild, and relative uncivilized lands where lots of interesting things might happen.  It becomes even more dangerous at times than the dungeon crawl, with the probability of getting lost, running out of food, or encountering creatures and people well above the level of the party.

If handled properly, a wilderness hexcrawl can be an exciting and engaging part of your campaign that will be just as enjoyable (maybe even moreso) than the "story" you have presented them with.  So, here is my take on the hexcrawl, some pointers on how to make it engaging, and keep your players' interest in the game.

First, the basic elements of what you need for a hexcrawl are pretty much considered universal.

- A numbered hexmap of the area (preferably with hexes representing 5 or 6 miles...I like to use 6 miles) with various land and terrain features like hills, plains, scrublands, marshes, forests, mountains, radioactive volcanoes, or whatever suits your flavor.

- Populate the hexmap with some interesting locations/events the PCs will discover if they enter the hex.  Basically you're creating a key corresponding to the number of the hex you want the feature to be located in.  Obviously, at first you want to focus on the immediate areas around the hex your party will start from.  There is no need to fully flesh out some ancient ruin 20 hexes away which your PCs might never encounter.  Keep focused on what's immediately ahead of you for the time being, as it will save you hours of unnecessary prep time.  When you're initially doing this, just make small notes about the features, and worry about fleshing out major details, drawing dungeon maps, etc. until later on.  In some cases, you're just going to have to wing it.

- Create random encounter tables.  Depending on the terrain or area, you might roll for an encounter 3 times a day or 6 times.  This is usually up to the DM to determine, although there are guides for such.  The 2e DMG has a table which gives the encounter chance, number of encounters to roll per day and what not based on the terrain type the PCs are passing through.  Random encounter tables can be simple with say only 6 options if triggered, or as complex as 100.  This is up to you.  Obviously the less time you spend on the encounter tables, the less diverse the random encounters will be.

Traveling over long distances for PCs can be tedious.  It's up to the DM to keep things entertaining and engaging for the players.  Random encounters or hex features designed for your party to find should be engaging for some reason.  Perhaps the PCs will discover a village in the next hex they travel to.  But let's say that village is cursed, and its citizens can't leave the village.  The PCs can investigate and maybe find the source of the curse lies in a barrow just outside of town.  Perhaps they'll be led to free the village from the curse at the rumor of some hidden treasure in the barrow.

These types of encounters can lead to little mini-adventures on their own, and can make the hexcrawl something the players will remember and actually WANT to be engaged in.  What you want to avoid is dragging out a pointless journey with uninteresting events i.e. "you travel for half a day, you're attacked by goblins (roll out stupid pointless combat), you take up watch for the night, you encounter some wolves (roll out stupid combat), you wake up and head out again," wash, rinse and repeat...boring.  Make the journey count, and make it interesting.

Hex Map of The Stonelands

Click image to enlarge

Above is my hexographed version of The Stonelands area of Cormyr for my current Cormyr campaign.  I used the free hex mapper at http://hexographer.com and imported a map I got from Candlekeep of the area to trace over.  Each hex = 6 miles.  The red trail there is a tunnel leading into the Tilverton sewer system from the Stonelands area, which is what my players are currently looking for right now in the game.  I plotted this map out because I imagine they'll be spending a great deal of time in this area over the next few sessions.  Currently I'm working on keying up the important areas on the map.  Although I've played with hexographer here and there, this was the first time I've ever used it to trace a map.  Hexographer is a great tool, although a bit cumbersome to use until you get used to it.  I'm not telling most of you anything new, most likely, as many of you are already very familiar with the program.  I mainly wanted a hex version of this map so I could key up interesting points and keep track of their progress through the area.  There's nothing quite like some good old wilderness hex crawling.

Dreadrock Dungeon - A Preview of Level 1-1

Click map to enlarge to high-res image

Here's a quick sneak peek into the first quadrant of Level 1 of Dreadrock. I am in the process of finishing up the key and putting it into a nice little PDF for download here, which I hope to have complete by the middle of the week.

This area is where adventurers will start out in the dungeon. This quadrant is the current home of the orc tribe I described in my previous entry, the Rakshir Orcs. As such, the density of monsters vs empty rooms will be a bit higher for this section. Of course, feel free to use this current map and key it however you like.

Area 1 is the entry point, via a dimension door from the tavern in Dreadrock Bluff. Naturally, you could replace the dimension door with a stairwell from a ruined keep, or a cave, whatever your preference.

**edit**

Note: This is only the first of 4 planned sections that make up the entirety of level 1 of the dungeon.  There will be multiple entrances into the dungeon in the other sections as well as multiple entrances to level 2 in those subsequent quadrants when I map them out.

Dagger Keep Dungeon Map

This is kind of random, but I was sitting around with my sketchbook tonight and just whipped this up while I was bored. Thought I'd share with you all. Feel free to use as you like, if you like. I call it Dagger Keep Dungeon. As you can see, it starts with a ruined keep with a secret trap door which leads to the dungeons underneath the keep itself. If you're looking for an easy way to key it up for a quick adventure, I'd suggest using the AD&D/OSRIC Dungeon Creator tool over at Djeryv's Graveyard. The dungeon itself has 14 rooms.

World Map: The Land of Numendyr

I'm in the process of writing a novel, or at least attempting it anyway, and in an effort to save myself hours of rewriting later, I felt it best to start out doing some world building first.  Of course, that involved designing a map of the world in which my tale will be set.  I'm currently working out the histories of the world, in a broad sense, to lead up to the point in which my novel will begin.

This is a map of the land of Numendyr, and yes, I suppose the design is very "Tolkieny," but I tried to be as original as possible in the names and places of the realms.  The style of the map is the only thing closely resembling the Tolkien high-fantasy mold.  There are no elves, dwarves, or hobbits in these lands, and magic is virtually dead.  Instead I have three human realms, the oldest organized kingdom of Coranthya, the free holds of Erderan, and a young, but growing empire called Anderos.  All three regions have been at war, and at peace, with one another at various times in their history.

I used Photoshop to create the map itself, and designed the brushes used to create the mountains, hills, and forests using sketches scanned in from my sketchbook, which gives it a very hand-drawn feel, I think.  The whole process took me a couple of weeks, working here or there.  I probably spent a total of about 10 hours on it altogether.

Click for high resolution view

The Land of Numendyr by Rob Chandler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at rwchandler.blogspot.com.