Hexcrawl Checklist: Part Two
This is Part Two of my series on creating a hexcrawl campaign. If you haven’t already read Part One, you should start there. That is where I both make the case for why you should run a hexcrawl campaign and where I provide you the basic resources for running a hexcrawl and creating a hexcrawl map that can handle a meaningful, long-term game that facilitates exploration.
Author’s Note: Sorry for the delay on getting this post out. I only have so much spare time to devote to TTRPG writing, and the last two months have been dedicated to finishing my pubcrawl adventure, Barkeep on the Borderlands.
This post has the more “advanced” details, the aspects that aren’t always considered essential parts to a hexcrawl campaign. However, these are the aspects that really add dynamism to your hexcrawl. With these, it isn’t just a map, it is a world to be explored, a world that turns and reacts on its own.
#6: Random Encounter Tables
If you don’t already consider this an essential aspect of a sandbox campaign, go ahead and change your mind now. A running theme in Part One was that a hexcrawl game needs time pressure in order to give weight to the choices players make. Do we stay here and explore the area deeper or do we press forward? If there is not ticking clock, then it never matters. And the simplest way to accomplish this is to have a periodical chance of a random encounter.
Unique random encounter tables also allow you to give personality to each region. There is no more evocative example than what Ben Robbins lays out in one of the original West Marches blog posts, reproduced below (my underlines in peach for emphasis):
“Another massively useful tool was the venerable yet mockable wandering monster table. No, seriously. Think about it: by creating a unique wandering monster table for each wilderness area (one for the Frog Marshes, one for the Notch Fells, etc.) I could carefully sculpt the precise flavor for each region. It made me think very carefully about what each area was like, what critters lived there and what kind of terrain hazards made sense (anything from bogs to rock-slides to exposure to marsh fever). They were effectively the definition for each territory.
Most tables also had one or more results that told you to roll on the table for an adjacent region instead. If you’re in Minol Valley you might run afoul of a goblin hunting party that came over the pass from Cradle Wood. The odds were weighted based on how likely creatures were to wander between the regions. …
Just having these detailed wandering monster tables at my fingertips meant I was always ready when players decided to do a little “light exploring.” These tables got used over and over and over again.
Players never saw these wandering monster tables, but they got to know the land very, very well. They knew that camping on the Battle Moors was begging for trouble (particularly near the full moon), they knew that it was wise to live and let live in the Golden Hills, and they knew to keep an ear out for goblin horns in Cradle Wood. Becoming wise in the ways of the West Marches was part of their job as players and a badge of merit when they succeeded.”
The encounters on the table should not simply be mindless fights. As my colleague, Joshy McCroo of the Rise Up Comus blog, outlines, good encounters (1) are broadcast clearly (i.e., giving players information), (2) have multiple possible ways of engaging with them (i.e., offering meaningful choices), and (3) have significant consequences (i.e., providing impact to the choices the players make). In my earlier Encounter Checklist, I give more specific guidance on designing good encounters, but my colleague Nick LS Whelan of the Papers Pencils blog has evergreen advice that complements it nicely for how to structure those encounters onto a good table as a whole. While those two posts contain nearly all the advice you need for writing a good encounter table, you can find some good examples from my colleagues Brent and Arnold on their respective blogs, Glass Bird Games and Goblin Punch.
Random encounters are best suited to games that emphasize player choice and meaningful consequences for their choices. The YouTuber, Design Doc, had an interesting video looking at the rise and fall of random encounters in video games (including its origin in TTRPGs). A lot of the reasons video games have drifted from it is because they are seen as tedious in modern games. This is similar to how they are largely ignored in OC/neo-trad style games like most 5th edition D&D adventures. But one claim from the video is that, in a game like Pokémon, if played using the “Nuzlocke” rules (where if a Pokémon faints, they can never be reused, among other tweaks), it instantly transforms the tediousness of random encounters into something tense. Now the player must be smart about avoiding fights because their resources are more limited. This sounds a bit like the OSR/POSR playstyle, wherein death is always on the table and can only be avoided by clever play. Random encounters are tedious in play cultures (like the dominant culture of 5e D&D) where the player-characters are only ever expected to die unless the player wants the character to die (typically to satisfy some character- or narrative-beat). But honestly, a hexcrawl campaign, with all the attendant opportunities to make choices and have impacts on the game world, is not well-suited to such a play culture. The hexcrawl is inherently more appropriate for an OSR/POSR style game, where player agency is the key element. In such a game, random encounters are not mere tedium, they are yet another set of conditions around which players can make their informed decisions.
Context-sensitive encounter tables can also be added to make the environment even more dynamic. Context-sensitive tables, a concept from the anywhither blog, add modifiers to the encounter roll to make some encounters more likely based on the modifier. For instance, it can represent the increased presence of lawmen when the player-characters are on the lam after comitting a string of crimes. As an advanced rule, I would make patrols from the controlling faction more common on roads (for instance, making those encounter tilted toward the high end of the table and adding +1 if the players are traveling by a trail, +3 if traveling on a minor road and +5 if on a major road [I would also need to increase my encounter table to account for all 2d6+5 results]). The effect of this would be that while the players are incentivized by the movement rules (discussed in #1 from Part One) to travel by roads to get places faster, they may be disinclined to do so if traveling in territory controlled by a hostile faction. Now they have an another interesting choice about how they want to push their luck.
A simpler way to mix up encounter tables is to include two separate tables for each region to represent day and night encounters. As my colleague, Ava Islam, says on her blog, Permanent Cranial Damage, “This is generally for predictable, reoccurring patterns of behaviour rather than unique events, though it can be used to add a dimension to those as well. Players can use ecological knowledge to know that if they wish to collect a bounty for owlbear hides, it is better to attack during the day when they sleep; if they are investigating murders in a village where victims are found desiccated in their beds with two suspicious marks on their jugular, perhaps they had best set a stakeout at night.” However, even if you don’t want to get into this level of detail or use context-sensitive tables, a set of simple encounter tables for your regions are a must-have for a good hexcrawl campaign.
Further Reading: Have a Nicer Trip, Context-Sensitive Encounter Tables, 5E Hexcrawl - Part 5: Encounters, Encounter Checklist, Amended & Restated Structuring Encounter Tables (required reading), Handling Random Encounters
#7: Calendars & Forecasts
Adventures occur in a certain space and time. As I noted earlier this year, often tools like maps are foregrounded (in part because they are more visually appealing), but it is the intersection of a map and calendar that produces a dynamic location. In her blogpost on Adventure Forecasts, my colleague, Ava Islam of the Permanent Cranial Damage blog, argues that just as players are given a map to use for their decision making, they should have a calendar containing the major festivals and other events known in the setting. That post (citing to a post from Eric of the Methods & Madness blog) makes the most compelling case against temporal railroading by analogizing to the famous Quantum Ogre problem in describing the “Quantum Birthday" problem (whatever day you arrive in town, it is the ogre’s birthday).
Changes in the seasons and weather also provide useful information for players to make decisions, along with providing a sense of realism to your setting. As Ava describes her game, “Given how inadvisable it is to travel during winter in Errant, I anticipate players spending the season hunkering down in a settlement. So, winter is the season that I will load up with all the urban adventures, murder mysteries, and court intrigue.” Errant, like other systems from Mausritter to the travel rules in Ultraviolet Grasslands, add mechanical differences to the seasons, particularly winter, to modify the players’ travel incentives as the seasons change. Mausritter, for instance, causes a higher chance of running into difficult weather that slows travel as the year progresses from spring to winter, while Ultraviolet Grasslands just provides for a blanket disincentive to winter trips.
Holidays are also a fun way to embed your setting into the temporal dimension. Sprinkle your calendar with festivals, feast days and traditions that are observed by the locals of your setting. These not only make the setting feel more alive but also give something the players might plan around—it may be easier to pull off a heist when a city is celebrating their version of New Orleans’ Mardi Gras, and clever players can use their knowledge about the setting and its calendar to their advantage. As Ava says in her above-cited post it’s “easy to seed specific adventures around [holidays], as such nexuses of activity will always have something notable happening, but also a sly and enterprising Referee can place specific adventures along the most common routes to the location of the events.” True to this advice, my forthcoming adventure, Barkeep on the Borderlands, takes place during a week-long festival of drinking called the “Raves of Chaos.”
The classic method for incorporating seasons and holidays is to keep strict time records of the fictional time in your setting. If that feels like too much bookkeeping on top of running a complete hexcrawl campaign, I developed a set of procedures that determines when the weather changes, when the seasons change and when holidays occur (along with a large table of random holidays) that plugs into an “overloaded encounter die” approach to hexcrawling (see #1 in my Part One post) in my blog post, Tempus Fudge It.
Further Reading: A Simple Calendar for Timekeeping, About Damn Time: A Campaign Event Table, Calendars, Not Just Maps, Railroading in Space and Time, Tempus, Fudge It, Adventure Forecasts
#8: Factions
The hexes represent land, controlling land is an avenue power, and there are definitely more than one group in your setting that want that power. In the initial blog post by Ava that inspired me to write this series, she gives an example of the way in which a rich hexcrawl can cause players to make difficult choices. In that example, her players decided to take a more circuitous route to their destination in order to avoid traveling through an area controlled by an enemy faction. What this illustrates is that adding factional control to your overload hex map has the same benefits of adding competing factions to a dungeoncrawl. My colleague, Nick Whelan of the Papers Pencils blog, offers his own pitch on including factions in case you aren’t already completely sold on their utility: “The players will forge alliances with some, go to war with others, play diplomat to negotiate peace between enemies, or convince groups to wipe one another out. Like tyrants, factions control some rooms [Nick is writing about megadungeons, but the theory holds true for hexes], influence others, and provide fodder for the encounter table.” That’s right, this ties right back to the random encounters in #6 above.
Nick also offers short and sweet advice for creating factions: “some kind of creature + some kind of distinctive behavior = a faction.” The method of “combine two things” is the best way to generate nearly anything (see, for instance, my early post on generating random gear), but if Nick’s combo doesn’t immediately strike you as a fruitful method, I suggest thinking of a historical group and combining it with some fantastical element. For instance, what if the Jacobites of the French Revolution but they’re wizards; what if the Italian mafia but they’re goblins; what if an evangelical megachurch but they worship demons, etc. The more unusual your pairings, the better your results.
Factions don’t usually work together. Some might have tenuous alliances but others will be hated rivals. These relationships between the factions are key as they allow the players to ally with or against this or that faction, and provide immediate consequences when they do so (e.g., if you help one faction, you piss off their rival). The method I use for linking factions is to create five factions and mapping their positive and negative relationships in what I call the “faction pentagram” (however, I got beat to the punch on writing down this method, so per the Chaos Grenade blog, it is “Five Factions Feuding” or the “5-Point Conflict Map”). This not only provides a bevy of relationships between the factions, but the process itself prompts you to further flesh out your factions. Oh the revolutionary wizards hate the demonic church but like the goblin mafia? Why is that? Answering these questions further flesh out what is motivating the factions and shine light on how they might interact and what actions they may want the player-characters to do.
Further Reading: Two Week Megadungeon, The Grinding Wheels of Disorder, Factions & Stature, Making Good Factions
#9: History & Rumors
Most of my discussion of the importance of time in hexcrawls has focused on future events, but the past is just as important. I initially pitched a hexcrawl campaign as being an integral part of running a West Marches campaign, but while the original West Marches blog posts do not mention hexes, they do mention this element: Layers of History. The West Marches posts and this checklist are hand-in-hand in trying to imbed logic and internal consistency into the setting to improve the players’ ability to make informed decisions. As those blog posts extol, knowing the history of your setting helps the referee keep the setting internally consistent. From Ars Ludi:
“A skeleton of history is your friend. Even the simplest outline tells you what belongs in the world and what doesn’t, and that’s a welcome advantage when you’re trying to seed your wilderness with some danger and points of interest. That’s two benefits, if you’re keeping track: it doesn’t just make play better, it also makes it easier to populate your world.”
As you have gone through this checklist making your hexcrawl, you likely have already been developing ideas for your world’s history. Placing settlements, geography and factions all imply things that have come before, but placing ruins on your map, besides being potential adventuring sites for the player-characters, are opportunities to ask, who built this place and how did it come to its current dilapidated state? I would not recommend going about writing an encyclopedia of your setting’s history (it is just an inefficient use of your time). Rather, I would keep notes of your ideas, and potentially sketch out a few bullet points of the history. You also do not have to come up with the history alone! In my earlier post, Worldbuilding as a Team Sport, I describe a method for collaboratively determining the history of your setting with your players. The benefits of this method is not only that it immediately gets your players invested in the setting and its history but it also means they start with some background knowledge of the setting without having to sit through a monologue from the referee. But there is no one-true method for generating the history of your hexcrawl campaign setting.
Other than using history in building your setting and designing its ruined dungeons, you can also embed history in rumors. Rumors are a helpful tool for tying everything together in a hexcrawl. The player-characters may hear history about (a) new locations they have yet to discover (i.e., all of the stuff you put on your hexcrawl map), (b) what dangerous monsters dwell in the wilderness (i.e., what is on the random encounter tables for certain regions), (c) what events are taking place or what the weather is like (i.e., calendars and forecasts), (d) what factions are doing and what they want (i.e., all of the factions you made), and (e) the history of the setting. As heard on the Alone in the Labyrinth blog, rumors, in conjunction with a host of other procedures (all described in this checklist), (1) drive players to investigate and explore the hexcrawl, and (2) present a simulacrum of a living world.
Further Reading: West Marches: Layers of History, Worldbuilding as a Team Sport, I Heard a Rumor: Seeding a Sandbox, How I Use Rumor Tables to Create a Living Campaign, Hexcrawl Tool: Rumor Tables, Hexcrawl Tool: Rumor Tables - Part 2: Hearing Rumors, Hexcrawl Tool: Rumor Tables - Part 3: Restocking Your Rumor Table
Post-Script: The Hexcrawl-Pointcrawl Combo 3000
This post was born when I read Ava’s spirited defense of hexcrawls against a rising tide of pointcrawl enthusiasm in the P/OSR blogosphere. However, hexcrawls and pointcrawls need not be eternal enemies. There is a method to use both in what I call the “hexcrawl-pointcrawl combo 3000”. This combination consists of a large pointcrawl where at each “point” there is a hexcrawl. The ideal use for this might be a ocean- or space-exploration game where traveling between islands or planets is run as a pointcrawl (which is a simpler method of travel, offering less variety in exploration) but the islands or planets themselves are hexcrawls. I plan on using something similar to this method in my own setting-cum-system, Prismatic Wasteland, where player-characters travel long distances between points of interest, but around those points of interests there is a lot to explore more granularly. Maybe once I perfect this method I will write a separate checklist just for the hexcrawl-pointcrawl combo 3000.
Further Reading: Crawling Without Hexes: the Pointcrawl, How Do You Handle the “Inside” of a Hex?, Why I Use Point Crawls More than Hex Crawls, Pathcrawl Revised, Point Crawl
By the way, for my fellow bloggers: there is so much advice that I could give about making a hexcrawl campaign. If you have any addendums or disagreements to any of the advice put forth in here, or if this point sparks some ideas for your own blog, let me know (@PrismaticWastes on Twitter, @Prismaticwasteland on the Twitter alternatives) and I will add those to the further reading here as they pop up. I’m going to treat those sets of links as more of a living document than the rest of this post or my other blog posts, which tend to be fire-and-forget in nature.
