Hexcrawling and Its Fundamental Use in Old School DnD Part 3

Previous entries: Part 1, Part 2.

In the last entry, I discussed creating the first 7 hexes including the starting location (usually a village or city, but could be any civilized area/feature) which is in the center, and at least 3 interesting locations outside of the starting location to explore.

Our starting map with 3 locations to explore

So, this next step requires a little bit of prep time, but don't spend too much time on any of the 3 locations (unless you have the time to do so, that is).  We know we have some sort of tower in hex 04.05, a ruin in 05.03, and a monster lair of some sort in 04.03.  This is the time for some brainstorming.  If you've already taken the time to think of some places/NPCs your PCs are likely to encounter in the starting village (inns, taverns, local lords, sages, etc.) now is the time to start tying them into the surrounding locations.

Why do the NPCs know about the monster lair?  Perhaps it is the home of an ogre who has been pillaging the farms of Windholm at night?  Maybe the spot of a local group of bandits who have been hijacking merchants passing through, effecting the commerce in the village.  Obviously these are quick and simple ideas, but they are presented to give you an example.  Find some way to tie these locations into your starting location.

Jot down some starting notes on each location based on their hex:

04.03 - Lair of Hedgemog the Ogre (stats here in parenthesis)  Has a group of hobgoblins working for him (stats for hobgoblins in parenthesis).  At night Hedgemog wanders countryside (50% chance the PCs might catch him in his lair at night).  During the day he sleeps in his lair and the hobgoblins protect him.

Now, if you have the time, you might want to draw out a quick map of the lair, key it with monsters, traps, etc.  And you'll need to do this for at least the first level of each of the 3 locations, but no more than the first level of each location (if it has multiple levels).  If you're pressed for time, try any number of free dungeon generator tools out there to get a layout for each location quickly, then key it up yourself.

The idea in the sandbox and/or hexcrawl is that the players have freedom of choice to go where they want and basically do what they want (and suffer the consequences therein), so you're going to want to ensure there is incentive for your PCs to want to explore at least one of the areas you've prepared.  There are any number of ways to get your PCs going.  Often most campaigns kick off in the common room of a tavern.  How will the PCs know of these locations or learn of them?  Why should they want to go there?  Perhaps they are approached by an NPC offering payment to retrieve a MacGuffin from one of these locations.  Or perhaps they just hear about one or more of them as prime unexplored locations ripe for plundering via rumors in the town.

Rumors are a great way to get the ball rolling in a sandbox, and in my opinion, offers the PCs the most flexible freedom of choice in what they choose to do.  I would start off with 10-12 rumors with half of them being either completely false or only half-true, while the other half are completely true.  Place them on a chart, and roll for one while they are in the tavern in the first night.  If they actively seek out rumors, roll a die (d4 or d6, subtract reaction adjustment but no less than 0) to determine how many rumors they hear from various occupants of the town.  Roleplaying these out can be great fun as well, and really bring the world alive for the PCs.

The key here is making them WANT to explore places you've prepared.  If you don't make them appealing, chances are your PCs can wander off into areas you haven't really prepped yet, and then you're completely flying by the seat of your pants.  Sometimes this can prove to be just as fun, and to be sure, there will always be a certain level of improvisation that goes into a sandbox or hexcrawl game anyway.

In the next post, I'll discuss topics relating to getting the PCs there (i.e. the actual crawl) from constructing random encounter tables, determining movement, weather, etc.

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.

Spicing Up Wilderness Encounters

I'm in the middle of fleshing out my hex map for the Stonelands for my tabletop Cormyr campaign, and after some time keying the main points of interest, I decided rather than key the rest of the hexes with otherwise mundane notes, I'd simply create a table, which could apply to most wilderness excursions.  Besides, this gives me another perfect excuse to use my d30 in play.  If you don't own a d30, not to worry.  Just use a d20 and use the first 20 encounters.  When you use an encounter with the d20, scratch it off and replace that number with one of the 10 remaining for future use.

Here's how it works: When checking for random wilderness encounters, if you roll for an encounter, roll another d6.  On a 1-4 use your standard wandering monster/wilderness encounter table you've prepared for the area.  On a 5 or 6 use the following table:

d30 Hexcrawling Wilderness Oddities

01. Makeshift altar with humanoid remains and dried blood staining the ground.  A sacrifice to some cruel god took place here.
02. Unconscious man/woman is tied to a tree (or bound to some other wilderness feature). Naked and has been robbed by brigands.  Hungry and weak from dehydration (perhaps a frostbite victim if traveling in winter season).
03. A pack of wolves (or other animals) is surrounding a woman and small child, threatening to attack.
04. Campsite with a smoldering campfire.  Anyone with tracking can make a check to determine there were 6-7 people camping here a few hours before and left heading the same direction as the party's goal.  Perhaps a group of adventurers seeking the same destination as the party?
05. Scene of a recent skirmish.  Dead humans/demi-humans (possibly adventurers) along with several gnolls scattered about.
06. Shallow grave with makeshift tombstone, on which is written: "Here lies Ralston. Thief, liar, and craven."
07. A cougar (or some other animal) chewing on the remains of a goblin.
08. A mage sitting under a tree reading over a book.  He tells party he is waiting on a friend, but doesn't mention why or whom.  He answers questions vaguely.  After a few minutes he starts repeating himself.  Eventually, he fades away/vanishes.
09. A female boar and several piglets.  The female will attack if PC's seem threatening to her piglets.
10.  An unoccupied cottage. Remains of farm animals outside. Bowls with food on a table within.  Abandoned for some time, but occupants seemingly just up and left.
11. Band of gypsies (possibly lycanthropes.) They offer various sundries and oddities for sale, and will read the fortunes of the PCs.
12. Lost caravan guard. He/she was guarding a merchant caravan which was attacked by bandits. He/she fled, and is now lost in the wilderness.
13. Remains of a funeral pyre.  Fire has long since burned out.  Ashen remains of humanoid on top of pyre.
14. Small pond with a beautiful woman swimming nude, her clothes on the bank.  She will seem surprised, and will attempt to seduce a party member.  She is actually a succubus.
15. Skull of a hill giant, now covered in moss and grass in patches.  Looking inside the mouth reveals a small cache with 100sp (and possibly a clue relevant to the adventure/area.)
16. Traveling pilgrims of some lesser deity.  They will offer healing, or other priestly services for a charitable contribution (which is unreasonably high.)
17. Body of a dead adventurer in chain armor, pierced with several arrows.  He is holding a sword to his chest in ritualistic fashion.  Searching the body reveals a clue about the PCs goal, or a map to another site.
18. A chimera flies overhead carrying in one of its jaws the dead body of a human.  It won't seem to notice the party unless they engage it.
19. Mad hermit named Boltus.  Adorned in the skins of various animals.  He seems crazy, but is actually a 9th level Ranger.  If PCs ask questions relevant to their adventure, there is a chance he can give info amidst his seemingly insane rants.
20. Band of hunters camping.  They know the area well, and if PCs are friendly will offer assistance.
21. Large overturned statue of a cloaked figure holding a sword covered in vines and other vegetation.  At base of statue is a secret compartment containing a map/clue of area.
22. Twisted dead tree in the distance with what appears to be a humanoid hanging from a limb by a rope.  When PCs approach, the figure is gone.  Tree is gray and dead, and marked with arcane runes of some foul god.
23. A wandering druid with a bear.  He/she will offer assistance and information to area, if PCs can somehow prove they are not endangering the lands.
24. Stone statues of 3 ogres twisted in horrific poses.  They are somewhat crumbling and covered in vegetation. Perhaps victims of some spell or monster effect from long ago.
25. A magical well seemingly in the middle of nowhere.  If PCs drink from the well, they instantly feel rejuvenated, and gain +1 to all attacks and saving throws for 3d10 turns.
26. A young boy pinned under a fallen tree from a lightning strike.  His leg is broken and he can't pull himself free.
27. A stone bridge over a small river crossing guarded by a gnome mage who seems of little consequence to adventurers.  He charges 50sp to cross his bridge.  PCs can easily overpower him and cross the bridge.  If they do so, however, they will be hunted by an Invisible Stalker.
28. A rare fungus is found which has a purple luminescence.  If any herbalists are in party, they can identify as a component for certain disease cures and potions.
29. A man lying unconscious and naked on the ground.  He doesn't remember how he got there, and seems in a panic with a nervous demeanor.  He will flee as soon as possible.  Man is actually a werewolf.
30. A small abandoned cave.  Entrance is overgrown with vegetation.  Inside is a cot, and a locked chest.  Chest contains 100gp.