A much more literal “layer” you can use in conjunction with a hexcrawl is a pointcrawl. You can actually imagine a hexmap and a pointmap both being used to depict the exact same swath of the game world.

But since hexcrawls and pointcrawls are both designed to handle geographic movement through an environment, why would you want to do this? Wouldn’t it just be redundant?

Not exactly, because hexcrawls and pointcrawls both look at the environment in different ways and specialize in handling different types of movement. A hexcrawl allows freeform movement in any direction, while a pointcrawl organizes the world into specific paths between points.

You can perhaps appreciate the distinction most clearly by looking at roads & trails.

While it’s certainly possible to resolve travel along a road using the procedures of a hexcrawl, in practice I’ve found that it can be quite awkward. In a typical hexcrawl procedure, there’s all kinds of decision points and resolution points that become redundant or overly complicated when the PCs are following a road. (For example, the PCs can’t really become lost.) Tracking progress through a hex while traveling by road is more fiddly than it needs to be, and also calls attention to the fact that the rigid specificity of the road is at conflict with the abstract nature of the hex. Even referencing hex keys along the road is more complicated than it needs to be.

Meanwhile, the types of decisions the players (and their characters) are going to naturally start wanting to make while traveling along a road are quite different from the decisions they’ll want to make while exploring freely through the wilderness. This creates a mismatch between the actions they’re declaring and the choices you need them to make in order to resolve the hexcrawl procedure.

In short, you’ll find yourself frequently fighting the procedure rather than using it.

THE ROAD MAP

So as you’re prepping your hexcrawl, you may want to take the time to prep a pointcrawl of the region, with a pointmap detailing all the major roads and trails. In my experience, you’ll also want to include the major rivers, since it’s quite common for PCs to use these as navigational paths.

These roads, rivers, and trails will likely also appear on your hexmap, of course, and give you the freedom to resolve travel along using either the procedures of the hexcrawl or pointcrawl, whichever one seems most appropriate and useful at any given moment.

In fact, I would do everything possible to keep these two layers in sync with each other.

If you’re starting from a hexmap, refer to the hex key as you set up the pointcrawl and:

1. Make sure to include every On Road / On River encounter located along the path.
2. Check for Visible landmarks that aren’t technically on the path, but would be seen while traveling along it. It’s quite likely that these should be included as points on your pointmap.

You probably don’t need to think about the mountains visible to the north while traveling along the Old Keep Road, but “midway between Northpoint and the crossroads you can see the ruins of an old lighthouse on an island off the coast” is a milestone you’ll want to mention.

Conversely, if/when you end up adding new points to your pointmap, you’ll usually want to make sure they also get added as On Road locations in your hex key.

BESPOKE PATHS

On that note, during actual play in your hexcrawl, your players will very quickly begin forging bespoke paths through the wilderness.

Sometimes this will be a deliberate action, which is what the trailblazing rules are for: The PCs are specifically marking paths with trail signs so that they can follow them later.

But it’s even more common for de facto paths to emerge during play: To get to the Violet Halls, we head east from Maernath until we hit the river, then follow the river southeast into the Gloomboughs until we reach the island with the standing stone. From there we turn due south towards the mountains until we reach the broken stone gate.

If you learn to recognize these bespoke paths as they emerge and add them to your pointmap, you’ll make life much easier for yourself. By resolving the journey as a prepared path, you’ll be able to much more efficiently and effectively resolve these trips through known territory, and spend more time pushing ever deeper into the Violet Halls.

(And, of course, if the PCs ever get lost along the way, you can be bounce back into the hexcrawl procedure and begin figuring out where they end up.)

In some cases, you may also discover that these bespoke paths fade away again (e.g., when the PCs have finished exploring the Violet Halls, the path they followed to get there stops being relevant). If so, and if you find your pointmap getting a little too crowded, there’s nothing wrong with pruning these paths away so that you can focus on what’s relevant.

(I do recommend archiving pruned paths somewhere that you can find them again, though. You never know when the PCs might suddenly decide to return to the Violet Halls.)

OTHER POINTCRAWL LAYERS

Pointcrawls are an incredibly versatile scenario structure, so it probably won’t surprise you to discover that there are more ways to use them in conjunction with a hexcrawl than simply an alternative navigation layer.

For example, consider an underdark tunnel system that links various dungeons keyed to your hexmap, but which can also be used to reach deeper and even more dangerous locations.

Pointcrawls can also be very useful for subhex navigation, which will be the topic of another addendum.

Back to Hexcrawls

DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 39A: Chamber of Bone

Tee felt the ratlings throw their weight against the door, but she was able to hold it against their charge.

Tee signaled for the others to back up out of the chamber of bone, bracing the door against another pounding from the ratlings on the other side. Then she jumped back herself and, as the ratlings charged through, shot out the pillars of bone.

A cascade of bone collapsed. Several of the ratlings, pouring into the room, were struck about the heads and shoulders; one was even knocked unconscious by a particularly heavy chunk of pelvis. Others slipped and tripped, their feet turned treacherously by the shifting mass beneath their feet.

In Rulings in Practice: Traps, I said that you’ll know you have the balance right when the players start harvesting supplies from the traps or finding other ways of turning them to their advantage. In practice, this is probably a specific application of a wider principle: The more time players spend creatively interacting with stuff in the game world, the more you’ll know that (a) you’re succeeding in including cool stuff that’s bringing the world to vivid life and (b) that you’ve got great players.

Conversely, if you’re a player, pay attention to your character’s surroundings and look for opportunities to turn them to your advantage.

In this case, my players were very on top of things. Here’s what the key for this room looked like:

AREA 8 – BONE CHAMBER

The walls of this chamber are stacked high with bones — human bones. They have been arranged in intricate and detailed patterns with an effect which is entirely ghastly. Four pillars of interlocking skulls and femus reach from the floor to the ceiling.

Handout: The Bone Chamber

Bone Pillars: Any blow to one of these pillars (AC 3) will cause it to collapse, causing a cascade of bone. Characters within 5 ft. of the pillar must make a Reflex save (DC 15). On a failure, they are dazed and must make a Fortitude save (DC 12) to avoid being stunned.

Swinging Weapons: Characters who swing weapons within range of a bone pillar must succeed on a Reflex save (DC 10) to avoid striking the pillar. Alternatively, they can carefully avoid the pillar while making their attack — this requires no saving throw, but does impose a -2 penalty to their attack rolls.

(This room was inspired by the Sedlec Ossuary. The handout consisted of photos from the actual ossuary, which you can see in the linked campaign log.)

In addition to just being a creepy room, I’d intended for the ratlings to take advantage of the environmental hazard. The PCs, however, were savvy enough to be suspicious of the ones, realize they were precarious, and then almost immediately turn the situation to their own advantage.

In this case, the idea of the bone piles being precarious had occurred to me during prep. But the key thing is just including the bone piles as set dressing in the first place. Even if I didn’t have an answer prepped, a nigh identical scene could have emerged simply from the players asking, “Do the piles look unstable?”

Of course, it’s not just the bone stacks they’re using here. They start by using the door to control the start of the campaign, giving them time to estalblish their tactical position (as we’ve also discussed in Running the Campaign: Battles at the Door). And then, at the end of the fight, Agnarr rips the crossbow bolts out of his shoulder and uses them as improvised weapons!

When you fill your description of the world with interesting details, you’re providing the raw ingredients. Once you’ve done that, it become very easy for the whole group to start cooking.

Campaign Journal: Session 39B – Running the Campaign: Clues Linking Scenarios
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

SESSION 39A: CHAMBER OF BONE

June 14th, 2009
The 22nd Day of Kadal in the 790th Year of the Seyrunian Dynasty

They headed north along the tunnel. It quickly straightened out… and then dumped into an open sewer channel.

Agnarr stooped to the ground and quickly examined it for tracks. “They’re wading.”

Elestra wrinkled her nose. “That’s disgusting.”

But there was no way to follow the ratlings’ trail through the sewage. So they backtracked to the T-intersection. There they pulled Silion’s body out of Tee’s bag of holding, placed a black hood over her head, and had Nasira use her holy touch to heal her wounds.

Silion resisted their questioning, at first feigning unconsciousness and then proving stubbornly intransigent. “I don’t talk to humans,” she snarled.

“She’s not human,” Elestra said, pointing unhelpfully to Tee.

“She can’t actually see me,” Tee snapped. “And I’d like to keep it that way.”

“We could cut her whiskers off,” Agnarr suggested. Silion snarled.

“Last chance,” Tee said. “Where are the children?”

Silion laughed. “You’re too late! Malleck has them!”

Tee slammed a dagger into her heart. They re-secured the collar and stuck her back in the bag.

“Maybe her tongue will be looser next time we wake her up,” Ranthir said.

“If there is a next time,” Tee said darkly.

CHAMBER OF BONE

The northern tunnel was effectively a dead end for the time being, so they turned south. In this direction the tunnel twisted several times, and then opened into a cramped chamber stacked high with bones – human bones. The bones had been arranged in intricate and detailed patterns with an effect that was entirely ghastly. Four pillars of interlocking skulls and femurs reached from the floor to the ceiling, supporting a vaulting horror of skeletal remains.

Tee saw that these pillars were particularly precarious and warned the others to be careful. They hung back while she proceeded cautiously into the midst of the bones. The tunnel continued further to the south, but Tee took the time to carefully examine the ghastly nooks and crannies of the chamber. In the far corner she found a section of bones that could be pulled free, revealing a hidden door in the wall beyond.

She opened the door just in time to see half a dozen ratlings charging down a long hall toward her. With lightning reflexes she instinctively slammed the door shut again and threw her shoulder against it. She felt the ratlings throw their weight against it, but she was able to hold it against their charge.

Tee signaled for the others to back up out of the chamber of bone, holding the door against another pounding from the ratlings on the other side. Then she jumped back herself and, as the ratlings charged through, shot out the pillars of bone.

A cascade of bone collapsed. Several of the ratlings, pouring into the room, were struck about the heads and shoulders; one was even knocked unconscious by a particularly heavy chunk of pelvis. Others slipped and tripped, their feet turned treacherously by the shifting mass beneath their feet.

Agnarr and Tor had positioned themselves in each of the narrow tunnels leading out of the chamber and the brunt of the ratling charge had been disrupted. They easily held their ground against the dazed and confused ratlings… Or, at least, they did until a ratbrute came trundling around into the southern corridor behind Tor’s defensive position.

The ratbrute thrust his greatsword at Elestra (who had thought herself perfectly safe behind Tor’s broad shoulders). She gave a little cry of outrage as she ducked out of the way. Nasira, standing next to her, backpedaled rapidly towards Tor.

With a flurry of his blade, however, Tor finished off the ratlings facing him and turned to face the ratbrute – which fell back towards a larger chamber to the south in the hope of getting a better (and wider) footing. Tor denied it the opportunity – pursuing it down the hall with quick steps; parrying its large, awkward blade; and slicing it up with vicious, lightning-spiked blows.

The two remaining ratlings in the chamber of bone – facing Agnarr and seeing what had happened to their comrades – fell back through the secret door. Agnarr gave pursuit, ripping an axe from his bandolier and hurling it from the door. The axe caught one of the ratlings in the shoulder, but the ratling – hissing and snarling in rage – ripped the blade out of its own body and hurled it back at Agnarr, catching him in the shoulder, as well.

Agnarr fell back a step, giving both ratlings an opportunity to draw hand crossbows. They fired, both striking Agnarr in the opposite shoulder.

Agnarr roared. He charged down the length of the hall, ripped the bolts out of his shoulders, shoving one into the heart of a ratling and plunging the other into the eye socket of the second.

Running the Campaign: Using Scenery & Turning Traps – Campaign Journal: Session 39B
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

A hexcrawl is one way of looking at a game world.

Like other scenario and campaign structures, a hexcrawl can be broadly understood as a method for organizing prepped material paired to a complementary procedure of play: A dungeon procedure provides structure for PCs moving between rooms and exploring their contents, and it’s logically paired to a prep structure in which rooms are positioned on a map (to make them easy to reference) and keyed with the information needed to explore them.

A hexcrawl, similarly, creates a map of the world broken down into hexes because those hexes provide a convenient structure for keying content and managing overland exploration.

But one must not mistake the map for the territory.

One way to think about this is to consider the howling wilderness of the typical hex: We generally key no more than a single point of interest in each hex. But whether we’re talking about a 5-mile hex, a 6-mile hex, or the Alexandrian 12-mile hex, if there was really only one point of interest in a hex, it would mean a vast and desolate place.

Lay a hex grid to scale over a map of your local county, shire, or district and you’ll see what I mean. For example, consider Brown County in Minnesota, which I picked by basically clicking randomly on a map. It would consist of roughly eight 12-mile hexes, but it contains seven cities, a couple dozen townships, fifteen major lakes, three major parks and wildlife preserves, multiple scientific outposts, and forty different sites on the National Register of Historic Places. Whichever eight of those you pick, you’re obviously going to be leaving a lot of stuff out of your hex key.

That’s how the real world works. It’s also how your game world works: Whether consciously or otherwise, you’re choosing to key the most important or significant thing in each hex, while overlooking the others. This isn’t a problem, of course, unless you forget the conceit and begin to believe that what you’ve keyed is everything the game world has to offer.

(This is also why the Alexandrian Hexcrawl uses random encounters to procedurally generate new locations — e.g., lairs — on the hexmap. The more time the players spend in a particular region, the more of these “overlooked” details they’ll have a chance to discover precisely in the area of the game world they’re spending the most time in.)

The hexcrawl also has a procedural bias: The material is structured and keyed for the PCs to discover it through geographical exploration (e.g., “We walk north until we see something interesting.”). But this is not, of course, the only way that PCs can explore or interact with an area. It’s also pretty easy to imagine interesting elements of the game world that are largely or entirely inaccessible to simple geographic movement.

What I’ve found useful is to think of different structures as being “layers” of the game world. A hexmap, for example, is one “layer” — one method of keying and describing the game world — and it’s often more than enough to run an entire campaign. But it’s not a complete picture of the game world, and you can add more layers, each describing the world in a different way and each conducive to different types of PC actions.

Furthermore, since these layers are all describing the same world, they will also overlap or intersect with each other in different ways. While the PCs are exploring and interacting with the world in one way, you’ll be able to use the appropriate layer to run the game for them. Then, when they discover something new and/or set a new goal that will lead them to begin exploring the world in a new way, you’ll be able to shift to a new layer — a different scenario or campaign structure — to adjudicate what happens next.

And you can also, as the GM, design your world with these phase shifts in mind!

NODE-BASED LAYER

For example, consider node-based scenario design, in which nodes are linked to each other by clues.

Each node is a person, organization, event, activity, or, crucially, location. This means that each location keyed to your hexmap can also be thought of as a node and linked to other locations on your hexmap (i.e., other nodes) via clues.

For example, the hobgoblin bandits lairing in the ruins of the Black Baron’s Keep may have been sent by the Necromancer to spy on the elves of Silverwood. When keying the Black Baron’s Keep, therefore, it would be perfectly natural to include clues pointing to both the elven village in Silverwood and the Necromancer’s Tower.

If you want to start experimenting with this technique in your own hexcrawls, I recommend getting started with some simple loops:

The Black Baron’s Keep has clues pointing to the Necromancer’s Tower, the Elven Village, and the Hobgoblin Village.

Meanwhile, the Necromancer’s Tower has clues pointing to the Black Baron’s Keep, the Elven Village, and the Hobgoblin Village.

And so forth.

The advantage of this design is that it creates compact little scenarios that can be naturally explored no matter which of the nodes the PCs encounter first: Whether they’re attracted by the strange lights in the Black Baron’s Keep, hear reports of hobgoblin raids from the elves of Silverwood, or stumble across the hobgoblin village, they’ll be able to follow the clues and discover the other nodes.

To add additional complexity to these simple setups, consider linking a single node to multiple loops. For example, spying on the Silverwood may be only one of the Necromancer’s current schemes, with her tower acting as a sort of crossroads between different node-based scenarios.

As you become more comfortable with adding node-based layers to your hexcrawl, you’ll likely end up gravitating towards freeform design in the cloud, with your various hex-keyed locations pointing to each other freely in whatever manner makes the most sense. In doing so, you may also discover that you can use these same techniques without necessarily creating fully robust node-based scenarios.

What I mean is that, with the hexcrawl structure as a backstop, you don’t need to strictly obey the Three Clue Rule or Inverted Three Clue Rule. Or, to put it more simply: You can include a single clue from Hex A to Hex B, and it’s just fine if the PCs don’t find it, because the hexcrawl structure means they can just geographically navigate their way to Hex B with or without the clue.

Note that you can also plant clues into other structures of your hexcrawl campaign:

• Rumor tables, for example, are basically just big lists of free-ranging clues.
• Random encounters can also include clues pointing to hex locations. (This can even be true of procedurally generated clues. Tracks, for example, are inherently clues that point you to the locations that creatures are coming from or going to.)
• Even random treasure can be used to plant clues. (Random treasure maps are a classic example of this.)

All of these links add depth to your campaign. They actually feed back into the hexcrawl structure itself, giving the PCs’ the information they need to set goals that will guide their exploration, allowing them to travel with purpose instead of just wandering around the map aimlessly.

However, we’re still only scratching the surface here, because so far we’ve only been linking locations that also appear in our hex key (and are, therefore, also accessible via the hexcrawl). There’s no reason that we need to limit ourselves like this: Locations discovered through the hexcrawl can link us to nodes — people, events, organizations, activities, and even other locations — that DON’T appear in the hex key and could never be discovered by simply moving around the hex map. They literally exist on a completely separate “layer” of your campaign world.

I frequently find this approach useful for cities located in my hexcrawls. Like Maernath, for example:

Maernath might be the PCs’ homebase for the hexcrawl, or it might be a city they discover while exploring the region. Either way, it’s easy to see how the city itself could be encountered through the hexcrawl structure.

But simply seeing a city on the horizon isn’t going to reveal all of its secrets to you. For example, what if a scion of one of the noble families is collaborating with the Necromancer? They might be just one node in a much larger conspiracy scenario that’s infesting the city, but the PCs are unlikely to stumble onto this conspiracy just because they walked through the city gates.

(What I also like about this is that it connects the urban environment to the surrounding wilderness, and you can obviously do the reverse, too. It weaves your campaign together, not only adding depth, but also making everything feel interconnected.)

Another fun technique is to stock your hexcrawl with rituals, allowing the PCs to piece together the clues and supplies they need to figure out what, where, and possibly when they need to perform the ritual. These rituals, in turn, might unlock unique spells and abilities; empower magic items; summon mystic allies; or even open portals to extradimensional adventuring sites.

The region described by your hexcrawl might also include traveling elements, like a touring carnival, merchant caravan, or mystic phoenix. These are, obviously, not keyed to specific locations. You might include such elements on your random encounter table as one way of integrating them into the hexcrawl structure, but node-based design can provide another path for the PCs to discover them and track them down.

Note: You can also use node-based scenario design to provide links to location nodes far away from the region covered by the hexcrawl (e.g., you’ll need to take a ship south to pursue the political backing of the local privateers; or you’ll need to go to the Imperial City to follow the Cult of the Black Eye). This isn’t quite same thing as thinking of the campaign in terms of “layers,” but it IS an example of how you can use shifts in structure to present or handle different types of scenarios. Your structure should never feel like a straitjacket; it should be a tool that liberates you.

Go to Part 2: Pointcrawl Layers

Back to Hexcrawls

Have you ever been sitting at a game table and the players start talking to each other about what they want to do next? But they aren’t really talking in character. They’re just kind of chatting with each other as players. Here’s what you can do!

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