Hex Crawls

Osrnoob

Should be playing D&D instead
There is that in the book! The setting is there if you want

So out of curiosity, how would you go about publishing a hex-crawl?

Tons of good examples! Robs work, Gabor or to the max would be hot springs, Illmire!

It can be as big or small as you want. Nod is massive! Wormskin. Zines, modules or big hardcovers

The ? To you is

What do you want to publish

Then we can say how best to publish the thing
 

The1True

8, 8, I forget what is for
So out of curiosity, how would you go about publishing a hex-crawl?
Would people just expect just the rough notes?
Or random terrain/npc/situations/encounter tables?
Would a few things be fully fleshed out?

Wondering if TS's review of Trilemma would of made that product a little bit better by having those short dungeon areas scattered on a hex (and maybe it does) and could that be considered a hex crawl with some other rough notes scrawled in?
I've been thinking about this a lot (I think my work bears this out?). When I first got excited about the whole hex thing due to the West March articles (ironic since my understanding is that dude doesn't use a hex map), I bought a whole whack of "Hex Crawl Chronicles" from Frog God and remember being distinctly dissatisfied at the time. Like surely there could be more. I tried to show what I thought could be done with my Irradiated Paradox mini campaign, which you seemed to enjoy? I fleshed out the areas of interest, provided paths and itineraries for groups that needed at least initial direction, threw in tables and an open map for those who might to prefer to go it the other way and try out a more open improvisational approach where the DM is exploring along with the players, and most importantly, limited the scope of the endeavour so I wouldn't end up overwhelmed as I did when I keyed the entire Vanished Wastes region. The only thing it lacks is that cross-referencing index I've been talking about.
 

The1True

8, 8, I forget what is for
or to the max would be hot springs
Once again, left me wanting more. There's a tipping point at which the creator fleshes the crawl out too much, at which point you absolutely need to provide rules crunch or the reader is left wondering how the hell to run the encounters you've so intricately designed. There's a threshold for rules agnosticism and Hot Springs found it. Abso-fucking-lutely gorgeous product though. Worth every dime. Pride of place on the bookshelf. Utterly unplayable as is.
 

The1True

8, 8, I forget what is for
I took a long absence from my ongoing 'Bulls Run' revisions thread which I know, just everyone was totally, breathlessly following... I'd had this growing need to replay Witcher 3 which I couldn't ignore any longer. God DAMN that game blows me away!

I think it's germane to this conversation because, although it doesn't use hex maps, it's emblematic of the style of play I'm looking for. That you can wander into the woods of Velen and literally sweep back and forth in a search pattern, stirring up amazing discoveries is just perfect. Sure, there is a central storyline and thousands of side quests of varying length. You can Point Crawl or Path Crawl. You can follow hooks and rumours. You can simply eavesdrop on peasants and follow the hints you get from that. It's so rich. So total. Sometimes the thing you discover is simply a stunning sunset over the distant mountains or a dramatic lightning storm breaking over the towers of Novigrad. Like the game knew you were going to climb to the top of this crag to see what you could see. I want that in my hex crawl. I think hexes force you to stop and come up with something/anything to be found no matter where you are, and I don't think that's possible, or at least a lot more cluttered if attempted with a regular world map.
 

TerribleSorcery

Should be playing D&D instead
So out of curiosity, how would you go about publishing a hex-crawl?
Look at the Wilderlands for the platonic example. The original is great of course, but the Necromancer Games version is incredibly detailed. Rob Conley, who posts here sometimes, did a ton of work on it. It's fucking expensive and hard to get physical copies nowadays, though. I am a huge fan of the setting so I dropped some dough on eBay but since Judges' Guild is persona non grata everywhere now, well... I won't advise you further.

As for modern examples, OSRnoob cited quite a few.
Melan's zine - Echoes from Fomalhaut has more than one hexcrawl, so that would be the place to start. If you don't have those already... what are you even doing?
Points of Light from Goodman Games, also by our man Rob Conley - this is cheap to get in PDF and has four small settings with hexmaps. Definitely worth your time.
 

Osrnoob

Should be playing D&D instead
CRAWLING ROB
HAIL THE HEX

On Robs rec I just printed matte poster maps of his recent wilderlands map redo and the city state

Its great! Making some custom tubes for them next weekend

Beautiful work
 

TerribleSorcery

Should be playing D&D instead
Bob Bledsaw III aired some of his thoughts on facebook and has since been unpersoned. JG material is off Drivethru except for some of the Wilderlands stuff that Conley worked on. Goodman Games stopped selling a lot of their stuff too. This was a while ago, I thought everybody knew. In addition to that, it doesn't seem like Bob 3 is running the company very well or has much interest in selling the old stuff. If you want JG material now, you can basically choose eBay or the high seas.
 

Osrnoob

Should be playing D&D instead
I hope we get redone Tartaris and Islands books. Those maps in color?

A redone treasure map book? Stop
Stop no no its hurts so good no no
 

TerribleSorcery

Should be playing D&D instead
What I did recently was doctor up my PDF of Caverns of Thracia in to Lulu to get a print version. Worked really well, and any old JG product should be doable the same way if you are a hound for physical media:
 

Attachments

Malrex

So ... slow work day? Every day?
I've been thinking about this a lot (I think my work bears this out?). When I first got excited about the whole hex thing due to the West March articles (ironic since my understanding is that dude doesn't use a hex map), I bought a whole whack of "Hex Crawl Chronicles" from Frog God and remember being distinctly dissatisfied at the time. Like surely there could be more. I tried to show what I thought could be done with my Irradiated Paradox mini campaign, which you seemed to enjoy? I fleshed out the areas of interest, provided paths and itineraries for groups that needed at least initial direction, threw in tables and an open map for those who might to prefer to go it the other way and try out a more open improvisational approach where the DM is exploring along with the players, and most importantly, limited the scope of the endeavour so I wouldn't end up overwhelmed as I did when I keyed the entire Vanished Wastes region. The only thing it lacks is that cross-referencing index I've been talking about.
Ya..I'm still waiting for Irraditated to be posted on DrivethruRPG...just saying. Go Forth MAN!! DO IT!
 

The1True

8, 8, I forget what is for
Bob Bledsaw III aired some of his thoughts on facebook
Edit: added above quote so people know what I'm replying to. Malrex snuck a reply in while I was writing, lol

Yeah I went and looked it up yesterday.

The only vote we have as consumers is where we put our money I guess. But I mean, it feels like all this cancellation just punishes the fans. The person who made the jackass comments is neither a creator nor the original publisher. Just a twit benefiting from the estate. I get it, he doesn't deserve our cash... or maybe more correctly doesn't really deserve anyone's attention, but at the same time it sucks that cool stuff is getting pulled off the market and honest creators are losing an income stream (however meager).

I dunno bros. Without getting into it, all I can say it it's a conundrum (for me anyway) and as much as I want to see justice done, I'm getting pretty exhausted with it all. It's like I keep wondering where favourite TV characters have gone and it turns out the actor who plays them couldn't keep their idiot views or hands to themselves and part of me doesn't care, I just want the cool, fictional character back, eh.
 

Melan

*eyeroll*
Apologies for dropping by so late. When I finish a long post, I sometimes need distance from the subject for a while, so a lot has already been said.

WRT @squeen 's distaste towards the form, there may be some deep philosophical disagreement there, but I still think I could have been misunderstood in some way. Hex-crawl content is not random noise. Like EOTB, I use random generation to create strange combinations and juxtapositions of ideas that would not come to me naturally, then use those basic ideas to come up with the actual encounters and sites which form the hex key. By the time they make it to play, they should have the following qualities:
  • basic plausibility ("this could exist in a fantasy world");
  • for a good percentage of encounters, a sense of the fantastic ("this might seem strange even in a fantasy world");
  • gameplay relevance ("the players can interact with this in a meaningful sense");
  • something beyond what a "raw" random roll could create (i.e. more than "3 trolls with a +1 sword");
Not every hex encounter will be all these things all of the time, but the overall landscape will have a good stock of encounters following these principles.

Second, yes, this is an improvisation-heavy playstyle (altough you could construct a very detailed hex-crawl, at least on a rather small scale). This does not make it bullshitting. Improvisation rests on both flights of fancy and fitting improvised elements into a logical larger design (even if some of this is done post-game). Improvisation is a technique to exploit opportunities and happy accidents and go with the flow. It is not directionless.

Third, the numbered hex grid does serve a useful purpose. This was a literal "Eureca!" moment for me when I first encountered it in the early 2000s in Wilderlands of High Fantasy. Suddenly, after several years running wilderness games via bullshitting, and lots of fruitless detours, here was a useful, compact model for conceptualising game space in a way that is
  • GM-friendly (easy to wrap your mind around it, to manage a game, and to develop content for);
  • player-transparent (putting a game board before the group to facilitate and encourage travel);
  • gives a good framework to have a landscape dotted with ruins, monster dwellings, and centres of civilisation;
  • ...and a good way to keep your setting ground-level and bottom-up instead of the top-down model which offers little assistance to run day-by-day-games.
It is super simple and very versatile. And that's the beauty of it.
 

Melan

*eyeroll*
Here's a "hiking map" from Melan's latest review of In the Shadow of Tower Silveraxe

View attachment 1183

In the comments:
Settembrini said:
Cover is nice, hiking map moreso, but the hexes make me suspicious: if I have a hiking map, I can have a continuous wilderness.
So tell me I'm crazy! Settembrini is (un)clearly implying that there is some weird hard-wired connection in most people's minds between the presence of hexes on a map and a weird, disjointed-kind-of-movement in discrete-actions that produce it's own (unattractive to me) mini-game. A "hex crawl" is somehow different than moving across a continuous map with hexes on it for distance and scale.
Settembrini favours a continuous wilderness model instead of hexes. The original post outlining this approach is in German, but may be manageable via Google Translate. You can tell by the comment how long the hex-crawl post took to write.

My comment on Silveraxe's hexes-meet-hiking-map should be just the classic quote: "How can you trust a man who wears both a belt and suspenders? The man can't even trust his own pants." Beyond that - and this is something I forgot to mention in the review - Silveraxe's weird hex referencing method made it actively hard to connect the text to on-map landmarks. The author messed with the formula, and got a messed up formula.
silveraxe_hexes.png
This is just stupid, sorry. The only reason it works - kinda, sorta - is because the module area is 8x5 hexes and there is limited room for confusion. My hex map sheets tend to be 26x17, a quarter of the Wilderlands standard. Try this method to find something on those! Hell, try sequential keying at that scale with approximately one location per six hexes, then try to find keyed locations 23, 72, and 140 back on that map. This is why XX,YY coordinates are a good standard.
 

Osrnoob

Should be playing D&D instead
I like Hex coordinates and for more on Melans how to Hexcrawl see his recent Picaresque RPG! The DM section in that struck me as heavily influenced/ a precursor to this article.

Next, I like the statment that improv is not bullshitting. I would also counter by saying what is running or playing RPGs.

It is play, surely these things (improv) are connected in a fashion its just a question of when the spur of invention occurs.

Last, you wrote in German too? Trilingual is impressive!
 

squeen

8, 8, I forget what is for
I good defense of the system @Melan. Despite my seeming ignorance, I did in fact understand that your system was a more structured one...and not purely procedural random acts. That said, I do think that the hex-crawling mechanics can lean towards an nearly autonomous engine for content creation. My protests were aimed towards that style, but perhaps that's only a outlier abuse.

I also take your point about the coordinates. The reverse-mapping (key to map) can be more complicated without them unless there is some effort to localize it. I'll have to ponder that a bit....because I do find both the coordinates on the border and the little numbers in each hex visually cumbersome (that's actually putting it mildly---I think they are clunky and butt ugly!).

We are also in agreement that improvisation is essential for a DM---in precisely the manner you stated. However, there's an upper limit in my mind. Between-game creative-prep is the foundation on which to improvise (in-game) unless you are a genius.

I thank you and Settembrini for giving me the language to express the heart of the matter---although I'll have to be careful to make sure I am "translating" it correctly. Continuous vs Discrete. That's what it comes down to for me. Despite its "simplicity" and "versatility", the latter evokes a 1980's video game to me in a negative way. I'll try for a latter post that makes a coherent case in favor of the Continuous model.
 
Top