So I have been reading extensively about Hexcrawling recently. It seems like a method of play which you can still find aspects of in the DMG (watches, overland travel) but is not fleshed out at all. I have read up on the Alexandrian, watched Web DM, Matt Colville and Bardic College YouTube vids, read various blog posts and bought a couple of pdf’s from DM’s guild. Soon I will buy hexographer and another pdf (some random tables for generating adventure ideas).
I want to generate a random world and fill it out with a Dungeon World style fronts system. The hook to why the world is unexplored (or needs to be re-explored) will be developed with my players. The idea would be to have power groups, racially based, to begin with. I like the idea of civilization having existed before but there was a hoard which ransacked it all and have now, after decades, retreated for unkown reasons. This means that some of the old towns can be visited, dilapidated and with new inhabitants. It also means that I can have those places uncovered on the hexmap as goals for the party to get to. Clear out the old town of Calistan and then protect the caravan’s of people who push out to reclaim it.
I am thinking of 12 mile hexes. This is so that the players can move over 2 hexes a day, one hex a day over mountains, swamp and heavy jungle or if it is raining heavily. This enables two navigation checks a day and three random encounter checks. The random weather roll might be a D6 with three fine days, two rain days and one hell of Earth storm day (basically can only travel if you pass CON save of suffer exhaustion).
The hexes themselves will probably not all have a keyed location (static adventure site) but the local power will have a, roughly, two day hex radius of control. Inside those areas the encounter tables will be primed with encounters which point towards that group. With a combination of combat, environmental and NPC encounters my players should have plenty to do in whichever direction they choose to travel. This is not to mention finding remnants of the old civilization and what they have now become. Setting up fronts enables me to do some off screen random rolling to see if one group pushes in on another. A world alive but unknown and in need of exploration.
Rules wise I am going to run with a DM rolled survival check for navigation based off a terrain DC table. The players will not know initially if they have navigated correctly or not. If they fail navigation the DM will roll a random direction (probably with 3 to 5 possibilities, I don’t care to send the players backwards). My main concern is how often do I tell the players if they are lost. We will run on Roll20 so I am most likely going to have the hexmap as a base with Fog of War covering. As they progress, they will uncover more hexes than before. If they say they want to move through the directly opposite side of the hex, but fail and move through a different one, it will be abundantly obvious they are lost. Again, this will be a conversation best had with the party about what we would all like / thinks works best. Getting lost is more about taking more time and using up more of their food and water and less about them wandering into an unintentional zone. Finally, encounter rolls and rinse and repeat. As a new DM to this style of campaign, I will most likely make some pretty big mistakes. Consulting the group and taking feedback on how engaging the systems are and how to refine them will be important.
For random encounter tables I will try to generate some unique ones, use the lists in Zanithar’s guide as well as another pdf from DMs Guild. This will be flavoured by a couple of dynamic encounter tables I built which suggest motivations and reasons for the NPC’s to be where they are. They might be fleeing something, they might be protecting something, they might not want a fight for x reason. I do not want to just roll and say “You walk through a bush, here are some orcs. Roll initiative”. These tables were inspired by Rollplay’s West Marches series, a great watch. I intend to try and roughly work out a few random encounters before the game so I can flesh them out with some purpose.
The hexcrawl system, with various factions and goals behind, tied to a situation that all the characters are invested in can make for a great game. I really feel that with some decent prep, a great sandbox experience that is story rich can be achieved. Once the players have come in contact with these factions and tribes and start making deals (let’s be honest, probably committing a lot of murder) and interacting with them the story lines should come easily.
RPG Downtime 