Did TSR ever release a true, bona fide hexcrawl?

[The Heretic]

I'm asking because it seems to me that the only true hexcrawls that existed at the time were by third party publishers. Since I was a TSR fanboy in the 80's, I completely missed this.

I don't think you can count Isle of Dread as a hex crawl. It's too disjointed, it's just a regular sandbox. There are modules in Dragonlance that come close (DL7, DL8 spring to mind), but even there I don't know if they'd count.

Maybe D1-3?

Hexcrawls are the shit. I've become a completist for Statler's Land of Nod hexcrawls.

 

[EOTB]

No, that was the Judges Guild fiefdom. I don't think there are any TSR hex crawls in the 70s/80s (at least of the type seen in LoN products).

 

[The1True]

The mountains in S4 maybe?

 

[Melan]

They didn't. Some of the later (UK?) modules take a few tentative steps in that direction, but they never did it seriously. It would be interesting to learn why, since JG's hex-crawling system is both dirt simple, and a great way to turn wilderness expeditions into clear, transparent game / adventure design procedures.

 

[DangerousPuhson]

I don't think you can count Isle of Dread as a hex crawl. It's too disjointed, it's just a regular sandbox.

I think Isle of Dread still qualifies - your group is literally crawling across a field of blank hexes, filling them in as they go along, regardless of disjointedness/irregularity. I mean, if that's not the base minimal definition of a hexcrawl, I don't know what is.

The reason I would call Isle of Dread a hexcrawl instead of "a regular sandbox" is because of the literal map of hexes turned over to the players - it's kind of the whole origin of the nomenclature. Sandboxes are different; they have no need to impose a "hex" format to be sandboxes, they just need to be open-ended. Isle imposes a hex format, so I think it's safe to call it a hexcrawl.

That being said, if your objection to Isle was more along the lines of "yeah, there's Isle, but I want something better than that", I completely understand the meaning of your statement.