Go to Part 1

Your rumor table should be a living document. The latest gossip, after all, is alluring because it’s topical, and the enigma of the table will degrade as PCs learn its content. Here are a few techniques for keeping it fresh.

SAME RUMOR, NEW CONTEXT

When you give a rumor to the PCs, cross it off the list. If you roll the same rumor again, you may want to roll again (until you get a rumor the PCs haven’t heard yet). Being aware that you’ve given this specific rumor previously, however, you might simply make a point of finding a different spin or variation on the information the PCs already have. (For example, if they’ve previously heard that a wyvern has been attacking travelers along the Southway, they might hear about a different group of travelers being attacked. Or from a group of explorers who saw the wyvern flying over the Red Plateau.)

Tip: In an open table campaign, the fact that one PC has heard a rumor doesn’t necessarily mean that the rumor will have truly “entered” the campaign. That PC might never be played again, and there may be lots of other PCs who never even meet that PC (for all of whom the rumor would still be completely new). It may be slightly less obvious that the same thing can be true in a dedicated campaign, as players may forget or simply lose track of a rumor they’ve previously heard. This is what makes the “same rumor, new context” technique so useful, as it can be used to reintroduce the same information in an organic, rather than repetitive, way.

REMOVE AND REPLACE

Alternatively, once a rumor has been heard, you can cross it off your rumor list and replace it with a new one.

You’ll also likely want to replace rumors that are no longer applicable (e.g., someone has killed the wyvern, so it won’t be attacking people along the Southway any more).

You may also want to periodically replace a random selection of rumors (whether they’ve been heard or not) just to keep the rumor tables fresh.

Tip: You can combine these techniques. For example, you might cross out rumors when they’re heard, but only replace them once per month (finding new contexts if they get repeated before then). Or just keep them until they get randomly cycled out.

EVOLVE SITUATIONS

When you’re updating your rumor tables, it’s an opportunity to both evolve ongoing situations in the campaign world and give the PCs a vector for learning about it.

• A wyvern has been seen flying over the Red Plateau.
• The wyvern is now attacking travelers along the Southway.
• The wyvern has attacked a tax assessor’s wagon and carried off a lockbox containing 7,000 sp.

These situations, of course, don’t need to be limited to stuff that was previously seeded on the rumor table. There’s likely lots of stuff happening in your campaign.

CURRENT EVENTS

On a similar note, a rumor table can be stocked with current events and gossip. When you’re restocking, you may want to drop older events and add new ones to enhance the sense of time passing in the campaign world.

Tip: You can think of the rumor table as having certain “slots.” For example, entries 1-4 on the table might be current events; 5-10 point to random hexes; 11-14 refer to random encounters; and 15-20 being where everything else gets placed. This can help make sure that the table remains varied and “balanced” in its content, while also making it easy to, for example, swap out your current events.

RESPOND TO PC ACTIONS

PCs tend to do lots of big, splashy stuff (like killing wyverns) that are exactly the sort of thing people tend to gossip about. So when they do something notable, add it (or the situation that evolves out of it) to the rumor table.

Players love this. (“Hey! That was us!”) It makes them feel important and it’s a great of showing that their choices are meaningful and their actions have consequences. And the possibilities are almost limitless:

• With the wyvern slain, trade along the Southway has boomed. The caravan activity has outstripped the capacity of the Patrol Guild and they’re looking for freelance guards willing to ride with smaller caravans to Maernoc.
• Lord Erequad has issued a bounty for the adventurers who are believed to have stolen the tax assessor’s lockbox (which was originally taken by the wyvern).
• Four hungry baby wyverns have been seen hunting on the Red Plateau.

In a great hexcrawl campaign, the adventure never ends and the rumor table is constantly driving the world forward.

Back to 5E Hexcrawls

Go to Part 1

With a fully stocked rumor table ready to go, it’s time to deliver your rumors to the PCs. Broadly speaking, there are three approaches to doing this (and you’ll probably want to use all three): proactive, reactive, and opportunistic.

Playtest Tip: No matter how they actually get a rumor, you can have the players roll for their rumor! It’s a fun way for them to feel involved in the process and can increase their sense of “ownership” over the rumor they get.

PROACTIVE

Proactive methods sort of “push” rumors on the PCs without the players taking any specific action to acquire them.

INTERVAL TRIGGER: At some regular interval, the PCs pick up new rumors. This might be once per week, at the end of each adventure, once per downtime, or any such trigger.

ACTION/LOCATION TRIGGERS: You might also trigger rumor delivery based on actions the PCs take which are not, explicitly, looking for rumors. For example, they might get new rumors each time they return to town or visit a new town. Or perhaps taking any non-solitary downtime action triggers rumor acquisition.

In City-State of the Invincible Overlord, individual city buildings would be keyed with specific rumors (which would be delivered when the PCs visited those locations). That feels like low-value prep to me, but it could perhaps be used to good effect as a spice.

CHARACTER CREATION: It’s a very good idea to give any brand new character one or more rumors to kick things off. Before play even begins, these rumors will give them the knowledge to start setting goals and making navigational decisions.

RUMOR CHECK: At any point where you have a proactive rumor trigger, you can make a rumor check instead of automatically granting rumors. You’ll also want to decide if it’s possible to gain multiple rumors at the same time, and whether rumors are gained individually or by the whole group.

For example, in my last open table hexcrawl campaign, every new character would get 1d4 rumors (the stuff they’d heard before the player started playing them) and I would make a 1 in 6 rumor check for each PC at the beginning of each session (representing stuff they’d heard around town since the last time we’d seen them in play).

REACTIVE

As the players learn how useful rumors can be, they’re likely to start actively seeking them out. They may also go looking for other types of information without specifically thinking in terms of “rumors,” but which nevertheless can feed rumors to them.

INVESTIGATIVE ACTION: The investigation action is part of the urbancrawl scenario structure, but this covers any effort by the PCs to deliberately canvass a community for information. This effort might require a Charisma (Investigation) or similar check, with the number of rumors gleaned being determined by the relative success of the check.

TAVERN TALK: Buying a round of drinks and plying others over a cup of grog in the common room of a tavern is another common shorthand for gathering rumors.

BROADSHEETS & BULLETIN BOARDS: Broadsheets (the antecedents of newspapers) and bulletin board notices are formal packaging of “rumors,” allowing the PCs to periodically check in and receive a fresh packet of information. (You can imagine any number of similar packages, ranging from town criers to magic mirrors murmuring cryptic prophecies.) The content of each package (broadsheet headlines, job offers on the bulletin board, etc.) can be bespoke creations, but it’s just as easy to roll them up randomly from your rumor table.

RESEARCH: Delving into the tomes of the local library or digging through the musty scrolls of the official chronicles may not turn up any rumors dealing with purely current events, but there are any number of rumors that can nevertheless be delivered through PC research (e.g., the trade in wyvern eggs a generation back).

ADDING COST: Regardless of the precise method pursued by the PCs, you might consider attaching a cost to it (for buying a round of drinks, well-placed bribes, access fees at the university library, etc.). I’d recommend against making this a particularly large fee, since obviously you don’t want to discourage players from pursuing rumors. Something like 1d6 gp is quite reasonable.

Another option is to make the fee optional, but have it grant a bonus to the PCs’ skill check (making success more likely or improving the quality or number of rumors gained). In this case, since it’s not essential, you can elect to make the cost more substantial.

Once a cost, optional or otherwise, has been attached to rumor-gathering, one cool thing you can do is add this cost to the equipment list for your campaign: Now every new player rolling up a character and every returning player looking to resupply for their next expedition will have an in-their-face reminder that hunting for rumors is something they can do.

OPPORTUNISTIC

Because the whole point of the rumor table is to impart information to the players, you should seize opportunities during play that you can use to leverage your rumor table. For example:

• During any broad social interaction (e.g., the players say “we spend the evening drinking at the tavern”) you might mention one or two interesting things they pick up in the general conversation.
• During specific interactions with NPCs, the rumor table can be used to generate topics of conversation.
• NPCs might be specifically questioned or interrogated about the area.

In practice, the rumor table can be an incredibly versatile tool, and whenever a dollop of information would be useful or provide a bit of spice, you can simply roll or select an appropriate rumor for the situation.

CONTEXTUALIZING RUMORS

When giving a rumor to a player, you can simply drop it in their lap: “You’ve head that a wyvern has been attacking travelers along the Southway.” It works. There’s nothing wrong with it. In fact, it may often be the best way to present a particular rumor. (For example, when I’m handing out rumors to newly created characters at my open table, I don’t feel a need to get fancy about it: Here’s the stuff you know. If you’d like, maybe you could tell me how you know it.)

Frequently, however, you’ll find it more effective to contextualize the rumor – to explain exactly how they came by the information and perhaps even give them the opportunity to play through it. This is when you frame up a scene at the local tavern where the PCs have noticed a young man with a freshly bandaged wound on his shoulder. Now they can strike up a conversation with him, learn his name, and hear from his own lips the tale of how the wyvern attacked his caravan and carried away his sister. They can see the haunted look in his eyes as he describes how her screams still echo in his ears.

Now those wyvern attacks have been given a face.

If you want a more detailed breakdown of how to contextualize this sort of thing, check out Rulings in Practice: Gathering Information. But the short version is:

1. Summarize how they’re looking for information.
2. Frame the key moment where they’re actually receiving the information. (This may include playing out a short scene, but it may not.)
3. Contextualize the information, taking cues from the situation, characters, etc. to provide a specific slant or POV on the rumor.

If you’re uncertain how the PCs might have found the information, ask the players what they’re looking for then. See what they throw at you and then play it forward. Or here’s a short list of options:

• Talking in a tavern. (Is it a quiet conversation? Or do they hear someone boisterously boasting at the next table?)
• Saw the information posted somewhere (a wanted poster, a bulletin board, etc.).
• Chatting with a friend. (Which friend? Ask the player if you don’t know.)
• Performing research. (Where?)
• A letter. (From who?)
• A tarot reading, fortune telling, or divine vision.

OPEN TABLE RUMOR POOL

Here’s a fun technique that seems to work best with an open table, but can also be adapted for a dedicated campaign: When a PC gains access to a rumor, it gets added to the open table rumor pool. This list of rumors can be posted in the group’s Discord, put on a wiki, periodically updated by e-mail, or whatever other method of coordination your group is using.

When a rumor is resolved (e.g., the wyvern is slain), reward Inspiration. You can limit this to just the group who resolved the rumor, but it may be even more effective to award it to every single PC in the campaign. This heightens the sense of community in the open table, and can also motivate people to get back to the gaming table ASAP. (Since otherwise their Inspiration will be “wasted” if someone resolves another rumor before they can use it.)

You can also leave the decision of whether to share a rumor with the open table rumor pool up to the individual players: Doing so gives them the opportunity to benefit if someone else can capitalize on the information, but keeping a rumor secret might be desirable if they specifically want to exploit it for their own gain.

MODERATE YOUR RUMORMONGERING

Rumors are good.

Too many rumors, however, will overload your players. They just turn into meaningless noise, and the players will just tune them all out. So, paradoxically, too many rumors can end up being functionally identical to no rumors at all.

In short, to achieve maximum effect with your rumors, you want to limit how many of them you’re handing out.

How many? Well, this depends on the players. I’ve had some players who keep meticulous notes and will have a couple dozen rumors scrupulously listed (and even carefully cross-referenced to their maps!). I’ve had other players who get a third rumor and basically say, “Fuck this noise.” So this is really something you have to play by ear and be willing to adjust on-the-fly.

The key thing to moderate, though, are your proactive rumors: Opportunistic stuff tends to be linked to specific interactions which makes it more significant. And reactive stuff, obviously, is happening at the players’ own request, and so is naturally not overburdening them.

In many ways, though, this is ideal in any case: You really just want a smattering of proactive stuff to (a) help players who would otherwise be lost and (b) remind players that rumors exist, prompting them to do their own legwork to dig up more information on their own recognizance (and to whatever amount they want).

With that being said, you may also want to limit the group’s ability to systematically drain all the available rumors out of the campaign. You might want to, for example, limit them to 1d4 rumors per downtime or per session. Alternatively, perhaps villages are limited to 1 rumor, towns to 1d4 rumors, and metropolises to 2d6 rumors (1d4 of which require special effort). This structure can actually be used to motivate the PCs to explore more: You want more information? You’ll have to go to the big city.

Go to Part 3: Restocking Your Rumor Table

As we’ve previously discussed, exploration can take several forms. The most basic form is simple curiosity, in which you just randomly look around hoping to find something interesting. This is, more or less, the level of exploration provided by the basic hexcrawl structure: You pick a direction and you march forth to see what’s there.

And there’s nothing wrong with that. Curiosity is the bedrock of exploration. But for a hexcrawl to truly come to life, the players need to be able to learn information about the region so that they can:

• set specific goals,
• ask specific questions, and
• plan their expeditions.

This is the function of the rumor table, which in its most basic form is simply a random table: Roll a die and tell the players a rumor. Each rumor provides a tangible nugget of information about the region:

d10  Rumor

1       North of Graykeep, there is a ruined arena which is home to minotaur.

2       A merchant has been kidnapped by goblins in the Old Forest.

3       An ogre living along Silkmauk Road has been known to offer aid and enigmatic trinkets to travelers.

4       There are ancient altars of red jadeite scattered throughout the area.

5       The old imperial fort stands on a plateau southwest of town.

6       The lizardmen of Tockmarsh are said to treat all tabaxi as if they were gods.

7       A white wyrm’s lair lies at the headwaters of the Red Rapids river.

8       A nymph of the White Wood will trade magic items for a vial of your tears.

9       In the Old Forest there’s a circle of stone sarsens. Stand amidst them and blow on horn of mistletoe and you can open a fairy gate.

10     Flying carpets have been seen in the skies around Mt. Skarlap, which lies east of town.

You can see how the rumors on this table would instruct the PCs about local regions (Old Forest, the Tockmarsh, White Woods) and interesting adventuring sites (old imperial fort, Graykeep, ruined arena, Mt. Skarlap) that they can now consciously choose to seek out (or use as navigational markers) rather than just stumbling across them randomly.

If this information is so useful, why not just give it all to them in one big infodump? Partly this comes down to effective pacing. In an exploration-based campaign, you really want the players to be slowly learning new things about the area over time. This also avoids information overload: By spreading the information out over time, it becomes easier for the players to process it and use it. (It’s the same reason you don’t read a textbook cover-to-cover, instead processing a section of the textbook and then applying it through practice problems, classroom discussions, etc. before proceeding to the next section.)

Conversely, if you only want to give the PCs a few rumors at a time, why go to the trouble of stocking an entire rumor table? Why not just design the handful of bespoke rumors that you’re going to give them? Well, as we’ll see, a good rumor table is an incredibly useful runtime tool for the GM, useful for responding to any number of actions which might be taken by the PCs.

STOCKING THE RUMOR TABLE

Stocking a rumor table is pretty straightforward: Figure out what size die you want to roll, list that number of rumors, and number them. (Or, vice versa, make a list of rumors until you run out of ideas or feel like you have enough, then count them, and assign whatever die size seems most appropriate.)

But how many active rumors should you aim to have in your hexcrawl?

There’s no one-true-answer here. Personally, I like to have twenty. A d20 is convenient, and it gives you enough rumors to cover the breadth of the hexcrawl without going overboard. (If you own a d30, that can also be a fun way to use that unusual die. But a table of d100 rumors, in my experience, can be a lot of work to prep without really providing a lot of extra value.)

In making each rumor, you’re going to be looking at its source, focus, type, and truth value.

SOURCE

The source of a rumor might be a:

• hex
• random encounter tables
• roads/paths/trails
• factions
• NPCs

Basically, anything you’ve keyed or created for the hexcrawl can (and arguably should!) be fodder for your rumor table.

In fact, if I’ve started struggling to come up with new rumors to stock my rumor table with, a technique I’ve found useful is to just pick a random hex, look at what I’ve keyed there, and then figure out a rumor that could lead the PCs to it. (If you’ve done a 10 x 10 hexmap, for example, you can just roll two d10’s, cross-reference their position, and look at the resulting hex.)

Playtest Tip: You can also use this “pick a random hex, that’s your rumor” technique during actual play to generate rumors even in the absence of a stocked rumor table. Obviously this means you need to be a little more comfortable improvising rumors, but it’s a very flexible technique which, crucially, requires zero prep.

FOCUS

Potential focuses for a rumor can include:

• Location
• Creature
• Object
• Actions/Situations (including threats and upcoming situations)
• Background/Lore

For example, let’s consider one of our example hexes from Hexcrawl Addendum: Designing the Hexcrawl:

C2 – WYVERN SHAFT

60 foot deep shaft that serves as the lair of a wyvern. The wyvern has dug an escape tunnel that emerges from a hill a quarter mile away.

Wyvern: Has a large scar on its left side from a spear wound.

Treasure: 7,000 sp, 5 zircons (50 gp each)

What rumors could we generate from this?

Location: Adventurers exploring the Red Plateau southwest of town report seeing a mysterious 60-foot-deep shaft.

Creature: A wyvern has been seen flying over the Red Plateau.

Object: A wyvern attacked a tax assessor’s wagon along the Southway and carried off a lockbox containing 7,000 sp.  It was last seen flying west.

Situation: A wyvern has been attacking travelers along the Southway.

Lore: A generation ago wyvern eggs were taken from the Red Plateau and sent east so that the hatchlings could imprint on imperial wyvern riders. The practice ended because the plateau became depopulated as a result of the egg-harvesting.

Note that, regardless of the rumor’s focus, each rumor is actionable, in the sense that it gives a clear location for the PCs to go. This is not strictly necessary, but should be much more the rule than the exception: The primary function of the rumor table is to guide and inform the PCs’ explorations, and it can’t do that if the PCs lack the information necessary to do anything with the rumor. (For example, a rumor that just said “there’s a wyvern in the area” is, at best, very limited in its utility, because there’s no way for the PCs to go looking for the wyvern other than just wandering around randomly.)

The actionable specificity of the rumor can vary quite a bit, though. “West of the Southway” is less precise than “check out the Red Plateau,” which is less precise than “the adventurers offer to sell you a map indicating the precise location of the shaft for 10 gold pieces.” But even the vaguest of these nevertheless provides some specific direction.

TYPE

Thinking about a rumor’s type, in my experience, is mostly useful if I’m struggling to come up with a good rumor. But most rumors will fall into one of five types.

Local Color tells you something about an area or the people/monsters who live there (e.g., “The White Woods lies north of Mt. Skarlap” or “the ealdorman is a man named Harlan, who lost his wife in a goblin raid twenty years ago”). Local color may be actionable — if you know the White Wood exists, then you can choose to go there — but lacks a specific motivation for doing so.

Other local color may not truly be actionable at all. As such, you might even want to maintain a separate table of Local Color Rumors that you can consciously choose to mix in with more meaningful intelligence.

Opportunities offer a reward, payoff, or some other form of gain. Treasure is always great — caches of magic items or bounties paid for the capture of an outlaw, that sort of thing — but there are many forms of reward: land, favors, a chance to flirt with a handsome centaur. Think about what motivates your PCs and seed that into your rumor tables.

Challenges are like opportunities, but with the addition of some clear threat or obstacle which must be overcome in order to gain the reward. Capturing a bandit to get their bounty is an example of this, as is a mine infested with goblins or a haunted forest where rare alchemical reagents can be found.

One form of reward that may not be immediately apparent is the simple desire to be a Big Damn Hero. If you tell the players that farms in the Fieflands are being attacked by mutant marauders, the desire to save the day may be more than enough to prompt them.

This is aided and abetted by the common D&D conceit that “where there be monsters, there by treasure.” If you tell the PCs about a wyvern attacking travelers along the Southway, you don’t probably don’t need to tell the players that “the wyvern is guarding a cache of treasure” for them to infer it.

Dangers are like challenges, but without reward. The other way to think about this is that a challenge or opportunity is something that the PCs might set as a goal for themselves (find the nymph of the White Wood, slay the wyvern, etc.), but a danger is something for them avoid, most likely while pursuing other goals. It’s the Valley of the Monocs they should go around; or the red gems in Cawthorne Keep that should be eschewed.

The distinction here can be kind of hazy, and will likely even shift as the PCs grow in power and ability. (“There’s a dragon over there!” is a terrifying danger to a group of 1^st level characters, but a rich opportunity that will leave higher level characters salivating at the thought of looting its hoard.)

Mysteries are similar to opportunities, but the “reward” is simply unraveling the unknown and/or learning secret lore: What’s causing those strange lights in the Tockmarsh? Why are there 60-foot-wide shafts drilled into the earth all over this area? Who built the red jadeite altars?

This category of rumor really relies on humanity’s innate curiosity: It may take nothing more than offering the players an enigma to fill them with a burning desire to resolve it.

A final thing to note is that we’re categorizing the content of the rumor, not necessarily reality: For example, a rumor might offer an opportunity of an abandoned silver mine… and it’s only when they arrive that the PCs discover it’s infested with goblins. Something offered simply as a mystery to unravel might nevertheless result in discovering a huge treasure hoard.

TRUTH VALUE

Keeping this distinction between rumor content and reality is also useful as we look at the truth value of the rumor. Rumors can be:

• True
• False
• Partial (there is a hermit in Shamrock Cave, but the rumor didn’t mention he’s a psychotic axe murderer)
• Mixed (the “friendly old hermit in Shamrock Cave” exists, but he’s not friendly)

In structural terms, the key thing to keep in mind is that even a completely false rumor can nevertheless motivate the PCs to go somewhere or do something that will result in adventure.

What you want to avoid, however, is continually offering them rewards and then leaving them with nothing. As long as the players are getting reliably enjoyable experiences following rumors (even when the rumors are false), they’ll continue following them. If that stops being true, however, the players will just ignore rumors as being worse than a waste of time, and all of the wonderful utility of rumors will be lost to you.

Go to Part 2: Hearing Rumors

In its most basic form, of course, the hexcrawl is a collection of hexes. Each hex contains some form of keyed content, and the PCs move from one hex to the next, encountering whatever each hex happens to contain.

Insofar as it goes, this basic functionality is just fine. Essential, really. It’s what makes the hexcrawl a fundamentally robust structure in which the players can never truly become stuck, because they can always just choose another hex to explore.

But if this basic functionality is the only thing a hexcrawl has to offer, then the hexcrawl becomes like a game of Memory with no matching tiles: You just select a tile at random, flip it up, and collect it. In order for a game of Memory to become interesting, there has to be a connection between the tiles (i.e., the pairs you’re trying to match). By learning these connections, the choice of tile in Memory becomes meaningful.

Similarly, for a hexcrawl to truly come to life at the gaming table, the players need to be able to learn meaningful information about the hexes and use that information to guide their exploration of the hexmap.

• “Those bandits told us their main camp was located in a cave three miles west of the waterfall. Let’s head there and shut them down for good.”
• “Do you want to go back and check out that weird tower with the bleeding walls we saw sticking out of the Sepulchral Holt?”
• “I don’t know where this map leads, but there must have been a reason that demon was carrying it.”

As the PCs gain information like this, they transcend random wandering and are able to set goals. Aimless curiosity is transformed into purposeful searching and true exploration is achieved.

There are a number of ways that the PCs can get this information. Rumors, for example, can either be freely distributed or gleaned from urban locations. Tracks can turn almost any random encounter into an information source. (“We can follow these goblin raiders back to their village.”)

But one of the most powerful technique is to connect your hexes: By exploring one hex, the PCs gain information that leads them to another hex. In this way, the random hexes of aimless curiosity are transmuted into purpose, and that purpose becomes self-perpetuating as each additional hex the PCs explore teaches them more and more about the area they’re exploring.

CLUES & LEADS

At a basic level, you’re including leads in your hex key that point to other hexes.

• The goblins are working for the necromancer, so if you raid their village you might maps or correspondence with the necromancer; or you might interrogate them or follow their tracks to the necromancer’s tower in the Sepulchral Holt.
• Conversely, if you go to the Sepulchral Holt you’ll find goblins from the village serving there (offering any number of opportunities for planting leads). Also, the necromancer is trying to help the goblins wipe out the bandits in the area (to eliminate the competition), so there’s a map indicating the location of the cave where they make their lair.

And so forth.

Since we’re talking about clues and leads, your thoughts might naturally lead you towards the Three Clue Rule:

For any conclusion you want the PCs to make, include at least three clues.

When it comes to hex connections, however, this is not strictly necessary. Remember that the hexcrawl structure itself provides a default method for discovering keyed content, so it’s okay if the clues for a location “fail.” So it’s fine if you only have two or one or even zero clues pointing to a location. (For the same reason that you don’t need three clues pointing to every room in a dungeon.)

Nevertheless, in keying your hexmap, you might want to keep a revelation list of your hexes to track how the various locations are being connected to each other. This may be particularly useful if you haven’t designed a hexcrawl before and want to make establishing hex connections a point of emphasis.

As a rule of thumb for your first hex key, for example, you might just make sure that every keyed location has at least one clue pointing to another location. That will likely result in some locations have lots of clues pointing to them and other locations not having any clues pointing to them, but it does make sure that the PCs are likely to quickly find specific information they can pursue if they’re currently without a specific goal.

TREASURE MAPS & RANDOM GENERATION

An interesting feature of the original 1974 edition of D&D is that its random treasure tables featured treasure maps. Lots of treasure maps. (25% of all “magic item” results, for example, would actually result in a map.)

This is a very interesting mechanic, because it systematizes the injection of hex connections (or to similar effect in a megadungeon). Rolling to generate a monster’s treasure would periodically prompt the DM to provide a clear-cut (and very tantalizing!) lead to another location.

(A similar system was that monster treasure was, by default, only found in the monster’s lair. So if you encountered a monster as a random encounter, you would need to track them back to their lair — which would likely have other encounters in it — in order to get your pay day.)

These systems were removed from the game, most likely because being randomly prompted to provide a full-blown treasure map to your players was daunting for many DMs, but I take a couple of lessons from this.

First, literal treasure maps are awesome. Include them in myriad forms. (Tattered parchment. Scrawled in charcoal on a ruined wall. A small blue orb that vibrates when you head in a particular direction.)

Second, some degree of randomization can be an excellent prompt to challenge ourselves and seek creative solutions that might otherwise have never occurred to us.

You can play around with this in all kinds of ways. For example, a fun exercise might be:

• Roll 1d6-2 for each keyed location to determine how many leads should be there pointing to other locations.
• For each lead, randomize the hex that the clue points to.

Trying to figure out how/why these connections exist will likely enrich your game world in fascinating ways.

(And if not, just ignore it. It’s a fun prompt, not the dice gestapo.)

VISIBLE LANDMARKS

As a final note, I’ll point out a form of hex connection that might not occur to you even though it’s in plain sight. Literally.

Landmarks which can be seen from a great distance — i.e., in another hex — are technically connected to all of those hexes from which they can be seen. (In a very literal, but nonetheless significant, way.)

Conversely, a high vantage point that allows you to spot is also a form of hex connection, allowing PCs to learn information that they can use to guide their navigation and exploration of the wilderness.

Back to 5E Hexcrawls

Go to Running the Hexcrawl

This post contains SPOILERS for Descent Into Avernus and the Avernus Remix.

The Avernian Hexcrawl was designed for Act III of the Alexandrian Remix of Descent Into Avernus. Intended for a dedicated table, the primary assumption is that the PCs will likely be exploring the hexcrawl in pursuit of the components required to repair a dream machine. It features 40-mile hexes with custom terrain, and we’ll also be using a different set of optional rules, including:

• variable travel distance
• the Avernian random encounter procedures
• the advanced rules for expedition speed

The PCs are:

• Kerstina, an Elturian hell knight
• Ereshkigal, a tiefling warlock
• Adi Themis, a halfling artificer

BEGINNING THE SESSION

The PCs have arrived at the Alvskraema caravanserai, located in Hex B2 next to the bridge which crosses the Pit of Shummrath. Ereshkigal’s infernal warmachine was damaged in a confrontation with a darksphinx and they came here looking for repairs.

Adi Themis realizes that the Alvskraema is serving elf meat as a delicacy, so they decide to pass on both the good and the common room. But while settling payment with Meltrus, one of the two forgemasters, Ereshkigal decides to go fishing and see if Meltrus has any leads on dream machine components.

Rolling on the Avernian rumor tables, I get this result:

Nirvanan cogboxes are used by modrons. I heard that the warlord Algoran recently captured a modron. His lair is located at the far end of the Ashlands. (Hex B6)

That’s perfect, so I just need to put that into Meltrus’ mouth:

Me (Meltrus): He strokes he wriggling, prehensile beard. “A Nirvanan cogbox, eh? Haven’t seen one of those in years. They’re mostly used by modrons, and there aren’t many of those around here. But you may be in luck. One of Algoran’s gladiators was in here a few days ago, spending his winnings on avariel goulash. He mentioned that Algoran’s out-riders had captured a modron recently.”

Ereshkigal: Algoran, huh? Where can we find him?

Me (Meltrus): “He founded a gladiatorial arena. It’s almost due south from here, built into the mountains that ring the far side of the Ashlands.”

The lead seems a little thin, but it’s close. So the PCs decide to check it out.

STARTING OUT

The PCs mount up on their infernal warmachines, which have a speed of 100 ft. They decide to travel at a fast pace, which means (using the advanced rules for expedition speed) that they’ll have a base pace of 60 miles per watch. This also means they’ll have a penalty to navigation checks, but they decide speed is more important and they won’t be able to get too far off course before they can see the mountains and navigate by landmark.

They’re starting in Hex B2 and heading south, intending to enter Hex B3. The terrain in both hexes is Wastelands and it’s Trackless, so they’ll be moving at ½ speed (30 miles per watch). They’ve already traveled one watch today to reach the Alvskraema, so they only have one watch of travel left. But they only need 20 miles of progress to reach Hex B3, so I know they’ll be getting there right at the end of their traveling day.

The group has a standard operating procedure while traveling: Kerstina takes the Navigator action, while the other two PCs take the Sentinel watch action.

As they start heading south:

1. I make a random encounter check, rolling 2d10 and 1d12. No encounter is indicated.
2. In addition to the normal random encounter check in Avernus, I also make an oppressive environment I roll 1d6, but no oppressive condition is indicated.
3. Kerstina makes her navigation check. The Wastelands are Navigation DC 12. She rolls a natural 20 for a total of 21. (20 + 6 for her bonus – 5 penalty for fast travel pace.) The groups heads due south without any difficulty.
4. Ereshkigal and Adi Themis make Wisdom (Perception) checks, but there’s nothing unusual to notice out here. I describe the broken scree of the Wastelands churning under their serrated wheels.

I mark 20 progress, which — as we determined — brings them to Hex B3. I check the key for Hex B3 to make sure there are no special conditions or visible landmarks (there isn’t), then I reset the progress counter to 0. They’ll need another 40 miles of progress to cross Hex B3 and enter Hex B4.

MAKING CAMP

Finished with travel for the day, the PCs circle up their warmachines. They decide to all take an active watch action, then take shifts for the rest of the night (with Kerstina, then Ereshkigal, then Adi Themis taking a watch with the Sentinel action).

For the first watch:

• Adi Themis makes camp.
• Ereshkigal reads some arcane texts they purchased in the Purple City.
• Kerstina takes the Forage action. The Wastelands Forage DC is 20 and, as a mortal, Kerstina has disadvantage on the check in Avernus. She fails. (But it was worth a shot.)

Although they’re not traveling, I once gain make a random encounter check. No encounter is indicated.

However, when I make the oppressive environment check, I roll a 1, triggering the condition. I then roll d12, getting a 3, which indicates extreme heat. I describe the temperature skyrocketing until the wasteland scree is steaming. Everyone needs to make a saving throw, and Kerstina fails. She comes stumbling back into camp not only empty-handed, but having suffered a level of exhaustion.

The PCs decide to shuffle things up: Kerstina needs to rest and can no longer take the first watch, so Adi Themis swaps with her. They decide to just wait out the extreme heat, as traveling under those conditions would be extremely debilitating. But they get lucky: The following watch I roll another 1 on the oppressive environment check, ending the condition.

I finish making the rest of the encounter checks for the night. During the sixth watch, an encounter is indicated. I roll d100 and determine the encounter would be with 5d10 imps. However, when I make the % Tracks check, it indicates that it would be a tracks encounter. That would be an exploration encounter, and since the PCs aren’t currently moving the encounter doesn’t happen.

HEADING SOUTH

The next day, the PCs load up and continue heading south. (Setting the same pace and so forth from the day before.) With 30 miles of progress per watch, I know they’ll reach Hex B4 during their second watch of travel (assuming nothing goes away).

In the first watch, I generate an encounter:

• d100 roll comes up 67, indicating a 1 yagnoloth.
• Tracks check and Lair check are both negative, so it’s definitely a yagnoloth.
• I roll a random encounter distance, determining that the yagnoloth will be detectable at 840 ft.
• I roll on the Avernian Reaction Table and discover that the yagnoloth will be Cautious/Threatening.

What’s the yagnoloth doing? Well, the write-up in Tome of Foes indicates that they’re often employed as contract negotiators. I decide he must be carrying (2d6) 4 pacts and (1d6) 2 soul coins to the adjunct court of Hell in Hex G1. Since he’s carrying some important material, I decide to go with Cautious more than Threatening.

And because the yagnoloth is Cautious, I decide to also make a Dexterity (Stealth) check, setting DC 13 for opposed Wisdom (Perception) checks.

The exact time of this encounter doesn’t seem to matter, so I don’t bother making an additional check to nail it down.

I now call for the PCs’ skill checks from their watch actions: A navigation check from Kerstina (which she passes) and Wisdom (Perception) checks from Ereshkigal (6, failure) and Adi Themis (18, success).

Since the PCs are traveling at a fast pace and can’t use Stealth, the yagnoloth has no difficulty spotting them.

I describe to Adi Themis the yagnoloth crossing the wastelands about several hundred feet off to the right of their path. I probably also hold up a picture:

So now what will the PCs do? Given the encounter distance and their relative speed to the yagnoloth, they may simply choose to steer wide and pass the yugoloth by. Or perhaps they’ll approach, hoping to glean more information about the region. (In which case, perhaps the yagnoloth will be the one to reveal how they can break the pact binding Elturel, if they haven’t figured that out already.) Or they may think the lone figure will be easy pickings and a chance to enrich themselves on whatever loot it may be carrying. (If so, who do the pacts the yagnoloth carries belong to? And will they come looking for them?)

A bit of local color to their journey or a pivot point which may change the entire course of the campaign? That’s the beautiful, emergent play of the hexcrawl.

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