I've done extensive reading lately on hex crawls. And I'm coming up short.
Here's what I know - they're a system for organizing and creating a world map.
Heres what I don't get - interacting with them, navigating by them, tends to put the game rules in center stage vs the fictional reality. Is this desireable? What fun is there to be had in a hex crawl?
What am I missing? Any insights here would be really helpful. I think I'm missing the essence or whatever.
I've been reading up on them since I'm creating a hexcrawl scenario called "A Hex on Candy Land" in which the characters return to visit Candy Land - having been there in their youth - to find that this awesomely whimsical land has been turned into a dangerous wasteland of civil war and strife. Lord Licorice deposed King Kandy and turned Mount Poprocks into a volcano that took out Candy Castle and much of the surrounding lands. The Duke of Swirl is fighting a losing war against the forces of Lord Licorice from his keep in the Peppermint Forest (on the cold side of the Gumdrop Mountains). It's up to the PCs to explore this place and figure out how to set things right before Lord Licorice defeats the Duke of Swirl and makes Princess Frostine his bride in order to cement his power.
Anyway, I checked out The Alexandrian's series of articles regarding hexcrawls and it sounds like the most godawful game imaginable, full of procedures and dice spamming to figure out simple crap like where the characters end up when traveling from one hex to another. So that's definitely not a resource I'll be using. On the other hand, I did find a few interesting articles that I'm going to use parts of:
Gee, I thought a hex crawl was a game whereby you navigated using a hex map, for overland adventure, etc. I didn't know there were rules, except maybe overland adventure rules, like weather, travel time. I guess I've been having badwrongfun (radbongfun) for thirty odd years.
Wuzzard wrote:
Sooo. Having read Iseriths first link I come away with "we have been calling this location based adventures since the 80ies, does it really need a new dorky name?"
kalil wrote:
To me, hex crawls are a fun way to explore and expand once characters have 'cleaned up' the local area so to speak. Sometimes what is found or encountered is random and at other times planned out. So many possibilities...
Those wilderness areas have also served as inspiration for places characters could establish their own areas/kingdoms once they became powerful (and rich) enough to do so. Maybe the areas are 'ripe' for settling as well due to valuable resources! 
Then there is the finding/exploring/reclaiming lost and forgotten kingdoms angle too. Old lost magic, relics, knowledge, portals, etc. just waiting for the right group of adventurers to 'stumble' onto them. 
Akeisha wrote:
bawylie wrote:
bawylie wrote:
"Do hexes add something or is it strictly organizational?"
It's pretty much an organizational tool for the DM, and for whoever is mapping for the players.
It does hold at it's heart the conceit that the game world exists as a running (and frequently random) process independent of the characters perceptions of it or the players immediate desires. If that doesn't appeal to you, then yeah, a hex crawl style won't be to your tastes.
Sometimes you just want to lead with "And then you get to Moria" and sometimes you want long establishing shots of walking in the snow. Strictly a matter of aesthetic.
DemoMonkey wrote:
A hexcrawl, as the term is generally used (you may, of course, find this or that person using it in a more specific way) is not a system for making a world map, but a style of play. Understood most broadly, a hexcrawl would involve the DM making a map (on hex paper, of course) and placing a few interesting points (ruins, lairs, dungeons, etc.) on the map, and then leaving the rest wilderness of various sorts. The players the go exploring. The presumption, of course, is that you will use wandering monster rolls, keep track of supplies, pack mules, etc. The players can wander around as they like, finding (or not) the various points of interest, and having found them choosing (or not) to explore them. Exploration, in short, is the key theme.
There is no plot here, of course, save in the sense that a plot might restropectively emerge from actual play. Still, it doesn't put rules at center stage in any way. Rather, it focuses on a different kind of verisilimitude, specifically, of resisting an emplotted world, but rather an open world which the characters are free to explore and interact with as they choose.
Now, some DMs might have a system for randomly generating the wilderness as you go along, especially if the hexes are large enough (say, 24 mile hexes) that each hex covers a full day of travel. Even in this case, the random generaiton is not meant to put the rules center stage. Rather, it's a play style that resists plot and story in favor of open-ended exploration and surprise.
Ah! So both the players and characters in this Playstyle are alien to the world. And ignorant of its content. Discovery is the main thing here. And even the DM doesn't know what's in until it's generated.
What about hex maps like Isle of Dread? Pre-created. Does that change the Playstyle? How?
In the very first edition of D&D, the map from the game Outdoor Survival (Avalon Hill, 1972) was suggested for use in the game. While the Avalon Hill game was about surviving in the wilderness, D&D players used it as a wilderness maps to explore (and survive), as well as travel to dungeons, lairs, ruins, etc. The map was hex-based, largely because the first, great board wargame Tactics (also from Avalon Hill, originally the Avalon Game Company) was a "hex and counter" game, using a hex map and counters for the pieces. This was basically standard for wargames, and all of the original D&D players (both the creators of the game and many, probably most, of the early players) were avid wargamers. So, using hex-based map for wilderness was second nature to them. There are, of course, practical and æsthetic advantages of a hex map, but the wargame angle is what connected wilderness map and hex map in the D&D psyche.
So, the "hex" part of "hexcrawl" is just meant to evoke "wilderness map" to oppose it to a "dungeon crawl". Some individuals may have made various tables and such to help in the random (or semi-random) generation of a wilderness map, even as the original DMG had tables for creating random dungeon maps. All the same, the hex=wilderness is in the blood!
Here is some advice:
1) This Article from Zak S (one of the D&D 5e consultants) is full of good advice, and links to other related articles and helpful tools.
2) How to Make a Fantasy Sandbox by Robert Conley with layout by Patrick Walsh. (Bugbears for Breakfast) is a good guide to creating a complete fantasy sandbox.
bawylie wrote:
bawylie wrote:
bawylie wrote:
I don't know if this helps,but here's my 2 cents.
I spoke last year with my regular dm about world and adventure building and we talked about hex crawls and this is what we consider hexcrawl.
It's mostly map and world building aid for sandbox style games. So,you start with one hex,let's say 20-50 km sqr. You flesh out what is there,landscape,climate etc. This is starting hex. Hexes around are in fog of war so to speak. So,based on players decisions and actions,you flesh out surounding hexes,one by one. For example,players want to explore mountains. OK,hex on the left is mountain region. They want to have sea adventure,hex on the right is shore. You just add what you need. One hex at the time. It's very usefull when you don't have whole world worked out,or you have only vague ideas about the world. Or you plain don't have enough time to prep too much.
bawylie wrote:
@Bawylie: Isn't a hexcrawl adventure just an adventure where the players discover the layout of the world as they explore? As for the hexgrid, it really just is a convinient tool for people like me that don't know how to draw .
But a hexcrawl adventure doesn't have to be totally random. The DM might have the whole layout of the area prepared ahead of time like in the Isle of Dread in which case the only difference with a sandbox adventure is that the players don't know what to expect.
Hexcrawls are nice when you want to have age of exploration flavored adventures or campaigns.
Did you ever try playing Baldur's Gate (the video game)? Technically, it's a hexcrawl. You discover the world map as you explore the different areas and you have all sorts of adventure hooks and monsters to kill on your way.
Hex crawl is just named relative to dungeon crawl. Land area maps were done on hex paper and dungeon on square grids.
I've never played or ran a randomized hex crawl or seen rules for generating one, but I have run random dungeons straight out of 1E DMG, and I'm vastly ignorant of most game supplements, so random hex crawls wouldn't surprise me. Isle of dread is a perfect example of a hex crawl, its a place for the players to explore and discover goals and plots.The players could even have a map of the area to use to plan where they are going to explore.They could even have a plot or a goal. They could be searching for something and don't know exactly where to look, or have a few ideas but need to plan how they travel to the location. Usually, this concerns areas without roads, or maybe a need to go off-road to avoid detection.
You don't have to focus an entire campaign around a hex crawl, just like with exploring dungeons, you can use the hex crawl as a tool in your belt to advance your game.
As far as I was aware, until Eberron came around and said overland adventures were "boring" and encouraged us to just red-line between set-piece encounters, I assumed using overland travel and exporation was a mainstay of most campaigns. I sort of associate this style of "purge the boring stuff from the game" with the change to 4E (probably not directly related, but similar), but is probably just another baby thrown out with the bath water.
bawylie it is mostly for a snad box type game where you go out and find stuff. Hexes are just used for a map the are not realy required as such but the DM can just describe that it may take several says to explore a hex as opposed to trying to work out what the PCs can actually see to map out just using a blank map.
THe last good hex crawl I know of was Paizos Kingmaker AP which was very clever IMHO and gave an excellent example of how to spice it up. The Kingmaker AP had.
1. xp for exploration. You got xp for exploring hexes, you could hit level 2 for example without a fight.
2. Keyed location areas.
3. Landmarks and resources. Resources gave bonus income for your domain. Landmarks could help your domain as well.
4. Side missions tied to monsters you may or may not encounter. It was usuially some sort of reward for aquiring monster parts or items at the various locations. An example would be ABC NPC requires XYZ that is of elven manufacture. Or a chef wants to make something using a Roc's egg.
5. A theme of building a kingdom finding good location which gave you a discount on settling such as a half price castle.
There is also no encounter guidelines as such so the world feels a bit more organic. This means you could find a Roc lair at level 3 or 4 or something like that or a dragons lair. There are usually clues that an area is not a good idea to go if you can't handle it often by talking to NPCs.
"Theres a Dragon in them there woods"
"Avoid the southern reaches, those trolls will...."
The ruins of Loch Narckall are infested by undead"
etc.
If you play le roy Jenkins style you will have a bad day. X1 iThe Isle of Dread is a good example of a hex crawl, some of the Companion level (15+) modules in BECMI also had rules like this asyou expanded your PCs domain. As I said Kingmaker more or less reinvented the genre and the kingdom rules were tweaked in Ultimate Campaign and you could probably port those rules to 5E more or less as is.
I am creating a hexcrawl for my campaign right now for when the PCs hit 17th level in a couple sessions (we converted to 5E from D&D Next).
I took the map of Al-Qadim Ruined Kingdoms (complete with hex overlay). Just using the map (not using Al-Qadim info in anyway otherwise), I started detailing some locations and possible monsters. Here's a rough bit:
Locations:
Kadan River ruin north
Brass dragon and blue dragon are dueling. Dragonborn are in the middle.
Kadan River ruin south
Overrun with monsters from a dragonborn versus tiefling battle. A tiefling death knight leads bone and horned devils versus a dracolich leading nagas.
Kadarasto, City Most Sinister
Fire cult. Pit fiend.
Krak al-Saajjaan
Ice devil, remoraz, ab yeti, frost giants etc. hold fort on behalf of pit fiend of Kadarasto.
lKrak al-Uuruj, the Mud Sorcerer’s Tomb
Possible monsters:
Iron golem
Mummy lord
Purple worm
Adult brass dragon
Devil, horned
Behir
Genie
Roc
Gynosphinx
Stone golem
Guardian naga
Devil, bone
Giant, fire
Thri-kreen
Tiefling sorcerer
Kraken
The PCs want to expand the republic they are rebuilding to the east where the ruined kingdoms are. They know a Flame Cult has sprung up there, likely led by a flame dragon. They know some elves, gnomes, dragonborn, and tieflings settlements and ruins are scattered about and any or all of those people might be willing to join the republic.
The PCs start at lKrak al-Uuruj, the Mud Sorcerer’s Tomb. They head east in any direction mapping as they go. And I unveil both random and planned encounters and provide clues to quests they want to pursue (convince the gnomes to join the republic, find a lich take his spellbook, kill the flame dragon and route the flame cult etc.). I'll use my list of possible monsters (which will also include NPCs and random events) for random table building and to fill in quests as needed.
The PCs unveil the unknown lands one hex at a time while chasing down quests and random events that interest them.
bawylie wrote:
I forgot tomorrownights session is a hexcrawl of sorts but the hexes are 500' each and I am using the hex sizes from X1 Isle of Dread. They are being chased through the foothills of the west wall mountians near thresholds and I will be using elements of Against the Giants as King Snurre and Co will be making an appearance. I'm throwing out the guidelines on encuonter building as if they do not run they will get swarmed by 6+ hill giants+Ogres+bugbears+dire wolves at level 5. There is a definate time limit invoilved so no short resting either.
CCS wrote:
bawylie wrote:
bawylie wrote:
bawylie wrote:
I am having trouble making hex crawls work in 5E due to the healing rate and short rest mechanic. My one tomorrow is more of a chase scene through smaller scale hexes, adventures like X1 would be to easy so I suppose one would have to use CR+4 monsters or deadly+ fights for hexcrawls.
I've done a few of the years, generally I used modules designed for Hexcrawls which usually included rules for them, but usually I implemented the rules very lightly. The general goal of Hex crawls is to give the players a sandbox feel and the best way to do that is to trim the rules as much as possible (which is usually the oppossite instinct and it shows from the designs that are out there).
Some of the modules I have used (note these are from various editions of D&D).
* Test of the Warlords: This is really an Epic Level module and designed for Basic D&D so you would probobly only use it for its narrative context, but its one of my favorites and I have used it probobly more times then anything else for inspiration and background for a campaign. Its primarily perfect because it doesn't "fill" the world, it gives you just enough to base one on and breath some life into it. It has lots of really great characters, lots of space and several epic events to use as markers for a campaign. It has a large hex based map and very basic rules for Hex stuff that easily squeezes into any system, less a rules system and more a approach to it.
* Pathfinder Ultimate Campaign: This is really an amazing sourcebook that makes it not only possible to run a Hex based kingdom building campaign, but it covers in great detail how to continue to run it between sessions and while its written for Pathfinder, it really is almost system neutral in the way its setup. It includes rules both for running personal busineses, owning buildings, dealing with NPC's and hirelings but also covers rules for kingdom level building, exploration etc. Easily one of the best resources on the topic of HEX driven campaigns ever written and very adaptable to pretty much any system.
* Legacy of Blood: Another great inspiration Basic edition adventure, in essence one of the players gets an inheritance and must get involved on a grand scale in the politics, wars and mysterious of a fairly sizeable region (playground for the players). Designed from the ground to be a narrative sandbox it gives you tons of inspiration with much more detail (filled in blanks) storywise then what you get from Test of the Warlords.
* Red Hand of Doom : I think that's what it was called, I believe it was a 3rd or 3.5 adventure. I was a player in it and it had a definitive sandbox feel, though it wasn't exactly a HEX crawl it did have that sense of a sandbox space as you played it and you felt as a player that you had lots of directions you could go and the module was prepared to handle it. Fond memories of this one though I have intentionally never read it because if I ever use it again it will most definitly be as a player.
The main thing to keep in mind about HEXcrawls is that they are different then Dungeon Crawls because each area is unplanned. You really want to be dynamic as a DM so you just invent story as you go. Throw out the hooks and see where they go. Its a good idea to have 2-3 adventure modules built into your Hex crawl so that there is defintive "Location Adventuers" that are fleshed out within the campaign and you definitly want to have a good back story for the entire region where the adventure plays out (who are the kings and nobles, where are the castles and cities, what are the conflicts in the region etc..). And of course the whole point of HEX crawls is for the players to establish their own slice of the pie so you always want to have an abandoned ruin for them to clear explore, clear out and renovate (for which they needs lots of money and need to adventure to earn it).
one thing to note is that you want to keep the players starving economically. Make earning gold a struggle, make politics a struggle and interupt everything with conflic (civil wars are always good, let them take sides!).
Good Luck. Hex campaigns are a lot of extra work for the DM, but its tons of fun as a player.. we love that freedom!
Xguild wrote:
bawylie wrote:
There's a lot of good advice here. I just wanted to add (or echo) a few things:
1. Hexes are no more mandatory than square grids for a dungeon. If you use them, they can be for your eyes only or shared with the players.
2. If you use Hexographer to create your map, there is a "fog of war" you can toggle to conceal the unexplored wilderness from the players.
3. Create as much as possible ahead of time so you can create cool connections between places and encounters. Extreme example: in the first keyed encounter, the PCs fight some goblins. Most of the goblins have rusty scimitars, but one has a nice sword with a distinctive trade/craftsman's mark on the blade. The PCs keep running across this mark throughout the campaign. At the end of the campaign, they delve into a ruined dwarven forge to fight the BBEG and discover that this forge long ago produced all those weapons they've encountered throughout the game. More common example, you find a map (or question a local) that reveals a new area you haven't explored and gives you an idea of what to expect between "here" and "there."
These connections are really important, IMHO, to avoid the hexcrawl from feeling like the PCs are just aimlessly wandering. And while the game is really about the exploration of a place rather than a "plot," these connections can be used to give the place a story ("history") that the PCs gradually uncover in the course of play.
When you lay out your hex map, are you using concrete distances (miles, etc) or abstract ones (like 4E's "squares")?
bawylie wrote:
bawylie wrote:
bawylie wrote:
ankiyavon wrote:
bawylie wrote:
I've always read "hexcrawl" as shorthand for "pre-populated sandbox that might contain anything in the game." As opposed to a world that levels around the PCs. A high level party might come across a goblin lair. A low level party might find their way to a dragon's lair.
I still haven't fully figured out why I would want to use hex maps. I'm currently creating a sandbox campaign and hexes seems to be the default assumption for that. However, the benefit of hex crawls seems to primarily lie in being able to create a mechanical focus on navigation, resource managment and backtracking. And none of those things sound particularly enticing to me. Hex crawl systemize the things that I typically prefer to fast-forward through.
In my game the default mode of travel is simply a road with occasionally divergent paths. Even for the forest area, all I need is to roll to see if the PCs get lost if they do time passes another check for random encounters and they can try to navigate again. I don't see the benefit of having complex mechanics to track exactly where the PCs ended up going on which hex they ended up on and how exactly they can now get back to where they actually want to go. I'd love to be proven otherwise but hexes don't seem that beneficial for sandbox campaigns. I can't help but feel that it all seems a little backwards. The idea is to easily organize your world but in turn you now require all these additional mechanics that require additional housekeeping to figure out where the PCs are going where a more freeform map could just use common sense/estimations instead to handle that.
abs1nth wrote:
Maybe this will help. There was a series of articles at The Escapist called Check For Traps. They were about how the author creates and runs D&D campaigns. This article talks about his philosophy of world building, and this one focuses on the hex map. I found his articles really helpful.
Here is an example of a hex crawl campaign. It provides a skeleton of a story for the things going on, but it's assumed the DM will make changes to suit ones' own campaign. One could easily run a game in Southland for a long time.
bawylie wrote:
iserith wrote:
Zardnaar wrote:
I'm interested in this. Heck, it even seems like something I can fart around with playing alone (yes, I know that sounds weird, ha. But rpg friends have been hard to come by these last 30 years; I had to adapt, or stop playing, and I don't do vids. Thus, random charts, and radomness, and such, are "right up my alley."). Anyway.
I'm very interested in it, but I've been checking into it, and I am overwhelmed by all the info. I don't even know where to start. I understand the concept, but insofar as how to put it all together, I need some sort of Hex Crawl 101. If anyone could direct me (in whatever way), and my insanity, it would be much appreciated. Thanks.
Grifford wrote:
ChrisCarlson wrote:
This is what I've created so far for my "A Hex on Candyland" scenario. Perhaps you guys can give me some advice on what to add.
So if you take the Candy Land board (see spoiler block) and turn it on its side so that the cold areas are north, this is what you'd have. This is a few years after the PCs went there as children and there's been some changes, notably, the destruction of Candy Castle by the volcano, Mount Poprocks.
