Go to Running the Hexcrawl

The Thracian Hexcrawl was an open table I ran using the original 1974 edition of D&D. The example below is an abbreviated, annotated record of actual play from that campaign, which I’ve adapted slightly to be consistent with the mechanics and procedures detailed in 5E Hexcrawls.

BEGINNING THE SESSION

As the players arrive, I pull their character sheets out of the appropriate folder. Since this is an open table, the players may be choosing which of their active PCs they’re going to be playing. (After which, I’ll return the other characters to the folder.)

In my Thracian Hexcrawl, two things happen at this point:

1. I make a rumor check for each primary PC (not for hirelings; although it’s possible for a hireling to be the vector by which a PC hears the rumor). There’s a 1 in 3 chance for each PC that they’ll receive a rumor. If they do, I roll on the rumor table.
2. I make a morale check for each hireling employed by the active PCs. On a success, the hireling continues adventuring with their employer. On a failure, I use a system based on the OD&D reaction table to determine the hireling’s action: They might automatically leave the PC’s service or demand an additional bonus of some variable amount. (Usually nothing happens, because the players have learned to keep the morale of their hirelings high.)
3. I make a check to potentially generate new hirelings who are available for hire in the home base.

Based on these checks, and their outcomes, I update the campaign status sheet appropriately.

While I’m doing this, the players are generally getting prepared for the adventure. This may be creating new characters if they’re needed. For established characters, it includes:

1. Discussing what their expedition is going to be.
2. Buying equipment.
3. Hiring hirelings.
4. Any other business they might need to attend to while in town.

The players may, of course, have questions for me while they’re doing this. It’s generally pretty easy to juggle their requests while simultaneously taking care of my bookkeeping.

STARTING OUT

While the players are wrapping things up, I’ll grab my 6d8 and roll them. This represents a full day’s worth of encounter checks (since there are six watches in a day). By reading the dice left-to-right as they fall, I can rapidly determine which watches in the day have an encounter. Since I don’t know yet where the PCs will be on those days, I can’t generate the specific encounters (which are region-dependent), but I can use my worksheet to jot down the Day/Watch when encounters will be happening. By generating three or four days worth of encounter checks up front, I can simplify my workflow once the PCs hit the road.

Note: If I do, in fact, know that the PCs are going to be heading in a particular direction and will likely be traveling through a given region for a lengthy period of time, I can also go ahead and generate full encounters at this point.

In this case, the PCs are in the city of Maernath, located in Hex O6. Maernath is an old city-state in the setting. It was here long before the Duchy of Thracia began pushing east in recent years (establishing the Keep on the Borderlands and the logging village of Caerdheim to the south) and the City Fathers occasionally chaff against the “authority” of the newcomers. Although the early adventures of the PCs were based primarily out of Caerdheim (which was near the Caverns of Thracia), an increase in interest in the Palace of Red Death to the north led to an increased number of expeditions being mounted from Maernath. Those expeditions resulted in various PCs gaining a lot of lore about the area surrounding Maernath and that, in turn, spurred even more expeditions there.

The PCs leave town along the road heading south. They choose to travel at normal pace. Because they’re following a Road/Trail through Plains hex, their movement modifier is x1, which means they move at their normal expedition speed of 12 miles per watch. (We’re not using the advanced rules for determining expedition speed based on the speed of the expedition’s slowest member.)

Maernath’s position in Hex O6 is biased, so it only takes 4 progress to exit the hex in this direction. They’re aiming for the river, which is on the road right at the border of the hex (so they obviously have no difficulty finding it).

Their goal is to follow the river into the Old Forest (Hex P7), so now I’m going to look ahead: Their course along the river takes them through the near side of the hex (6 miles away) into Hex P6 and, from there, they will then pass through another near side into Hex P7 (another 6 miles). Although they’ve left the road, they’re still traveling through Plains and the river provides enough of a track that they’re still traveling at 12 miles per watch. Total it up:

4 miles (Maernath to River/Hex O7) + 6 miles (O7 to P6) + 6 miles (P6 to P7) = 16 miles

Which means they’ll arrive at the edge of the Old Forest a little over an hour into their second watch. This is notable because, looking at my worksheet, I can see that the second watch of the day has a wandering encounter (I rolled 1 on the 1d8 when making the encounter check). I can determine the time in a watch by rolling 1d8. The result is a 3, which basically means the encounter is scheduled to take place just as they’re reaching the edge of the Old Forest.

This is a border hex, and I’ve listed a 50% chance of border encounters for the Old Forest. So even though we’re still in the Plains, there’s a 50% chance that I’ll roll an Old Forest encounter instead.

1. I roll a 13, so that’s exactly what’s going to happen.
2. I flip to the Old Forest encounter table and roll. The result I get is “Slimes,” which has a sub-table which generates Gray Ooze.
3. Gray Ooze has a 25% chance of being a Tracks encounter, but I roll 46 (so it’s not).

They have no chance of being a Lair encounter, so I can skip that step.

Given the confluence of factors involved, I’m going to have the Gray Oozes appear just as the river passes beneath the boughs of the Old Forest. They’ll be draped across the tree branches above the river like some kind of horrific Spanish moss.

INTO THE OLD FOREST

After the PCs have dealt with (or avoided) the Gray Oozes, they’ll be able to continue along the river. It’s a Medium Forest and the trail has disappeared, so their speed is going to drop by ½. They had 8 miles of movement left in their second watch, so they’ll be able to gain 4 progress through Hex P7.

Three miles along the river, however, they come to a tree on the south bank of the river with the Dwarven letter “mu” carved into its trunk. They’re familiar with it. In fact, one of the PCs left it here as a marker: Gordur, a powerful orc stronghold, lies several miles due south from this spot.

This, however, is not their goal. They continue along the river for another mile and then make camp for the night. The next day, they continue another two miles until they find a similar tree with the Dwarven letter “thod” carved into it. This marker was place due north of the Crypt of Luan Phien. The crypt is their ultimate goal, so now they turn south, away from the clear navigational landmark of the river, and into the depths of the Old Forest.

At this point, they need to start making navigation checks. Epicaste, a hireling rescued by the dwarf Aeng from a thousand-year slumber in the Caverns of Thracia, is the group’s navigator, so she steps forward and takes point.

1. It’s a Medium Forest, so the Navigation DC is 16.
2. Epicaste blows the check. (Possibly because Delmhurst, another hireling, keeps second-guessing her.) I roll 1d10 to determine the group’s veer. With a roll of 8, I determine that they’re veering to the right. Instead of heading due south into Hex P8 (which is where they want to go), they’re going to end up southwest in Hex O8.

LOST IN THE OLD FOREST

When does that actually happen? Well, they entered Hex P7 from due north. Whether they’re leaving into Hex P8 or Hex O8, they’re still existing through the far side of the hex. So they need to rack up 12 progress to exit the hex.

• They’d gained 4 progress in the hex during their second watch. They don’t want to do a forced march, so they stop traveling after the second watch.
• During the first watch of the next day (their third watch of travel overall), they’ll gain another 6 progress. That’s a total of 10 progress, which is not quite enough.
• Therefore, they’ll enter Hex O8 about midway through the second watch of their second day of travel.

Checking my worksheet, I can see that I generated a location encounter for the second watch of the second day, so once again I generate a random time and determine that they’ll encounter the hex’s keyed location AFTER they’ve entered Hex O8. (If the encounter had happened earlier, it would have been with the keyed location in Hex P7.)

I flip to the key for Hex O8:

Me: Towards the waning hours of the day, you enter a small clearing. Criss-crossing branches grow into what appear to be houses with walls of woven moss.

Aeng: I don’t remember this.

Delmhurst: I think the thousand-year dummy has gotten us lost again.

It turns out the strange houses are empty and abandoned. It’s getting late in the day, so the PCs decide to make camp here for the night. They’ll try to backtrack the trail the next day and figure out where they made the wrong turn.

And that’s basically all there is to it. With a strong key and a clean procedure, the hexcrawl will flow naturally in response to the explorations of the PCs, drawing them deeper and deeper into the mysteries of the wilderness.

Next: Example of Play – Avernian Hexcrawl

This will be a detailed look at the actual process of running a hexcrawl at the gaming table: How I organize my tools, what I’m thinking about during the game, the decisions I make (and why I make them), how I play with and exploit the tools, and so forth.

I’m not entirely sure how useful this will be, but I’m hoping it will provide some useful insight and practical advice into using 5E Hexcrawls.

THE FOUR DOCUMENTS

What I’ve found over the years is that no two campaigns ever use exactly the same methods of documentation, but when I’m running a hexcrawl I generally find that I’m maintaining four “documents”:

• THE HEX MAP. Printed off on a single 8.5” x 11” piece of paper that I can lay flat on the table in front of me.
• THE BINDER. This contains the campaign key. It includes background information (historical epochs, current civilizations, custom terrain types, environmental conditions, etc.), random encounter tables, and the hex key.
• THE FOLDER. Each document in this folder details a single location. As described in Designing the Hexcrawl, any location that requires more than a single page to describe gets bumped out of the hex key and placed in its own document. (This keeps the hex key clean and easy to use; it also makes it easier to organize and use these larger adventures.) Each adventure location is labeled with and sorted by its hex number for easy access when needed.
• CAMPAIGN STATUS SHEET. This document is updated and reprinted for each session. It’s responsible for keeping the campaign in motion. In my Thracian Hexcrawl, for example, the campaign status sheet included: A list of current events in Caerdheim and Maernath (the two cities serving as home base for the PCs); a list of empty complexes (which I reference when I make a once-per-session check to see if they’ve been reinhabited); the current rumor table; details about the various businesses being run by the PCs; and the master loyalty/morale table for PC hirelings. I talk about campaign status sheets in more detail over here.

STATUS QUO PREP

The heart of the hexcrawl, of course, is the hex key itself (along with the folder of detailed locations). And because the promise of the hexcrawl is that the PCs can go anywhere they want, it takes a lot of front-loaded prep to get this material ready for the first session of play.

The up-side, though, is that once all that prep is finished, a hexcrawl campaign based around wilderness exploration becomes incredibly prep-light: I typically spend no more than 10-15 minutes getting ready for each session, because all I’m really doing is jotting down a few notes to keep my documentation up to date with what happened in the last session.

What makes this work is that the content of each hex is designed in a state of “status quo” until the PCs touch it. Once the PCs start touching stuff, of course, the ripples can start spreading very fast and very far. However, in the absence of continued PC interaction, things in the campaign world will generally trend back towards a new status quo.

This status quo method generally only works if you have robust, default structures for delivering scenario hooks. In the case of the hexcrawl, of course, I do: Both the rumor tables and the hexcrawl structure itself will drive PCs towards new scenarios. (If all else fails in a hexcrawl, of course, the PCs can always choose a direction and start walking to find something interesting to do.)

The advantage of the status quo method is that it minimizes the amount of work you have to do as a GM. (Keeping 100+ hexes up in the air and active at all times would require a ridiculous amount of effort.) It also minimizes the amount of prep work which is wasted. (If you’re constantly generating background events that the PCs are unaware of and not interacting with, that’s all wasted effort.)

In practical terms, it means that you prep for each session consists of “touching base” on a half dozen or perhaps a dozen “active” hexes. That might mean:

• Updating the adversary roster
• Updating the key to reflect PC actions (although if you keep good notes during play, this is often perfunctory)
• Repopulating an empty location (using your random encounter tables or following your inspiration)

In addition to whatever tasks are necessary around the PCs’ home base.

A key thing to keep in mind throughout this process is that “status quo” doesn’t mean “boring.” It also doesn’t mean that literally nothing is happening at a given location. For example, the status quo for a camp of goblin slavers isn’t “the goblins all sit around.” The status quo is that there’s a steady flow of slaves passing through the camp and being sold.

For a deeper discussion of this, check out Status Quo Design.

SETUP

An hour or so before the game is scheduled to start, I’ll set up the table.

I sit at one end of a long dining room table. I place a TV tray to the left of my chair and another TV tray to the right of my chair. Then I pull out the box that I keep all my hexcrawl material in.

On the TV tray to my right, I place the Binder that contains the campaign key and the Folder that contains the documents detailing individual locations.

There’s a second folder that contains my GM Screen. I use a moduler screen, that allows me to insert reference sheets. (The reference sheets consist of the watch checklist and all supporting material, like terrain modifiers.) This folder also contains several copies of my GM Hexcrawl Worksheet, and I pull one of those out and place it on the table in front of me.

I remove the Hex Map from the binder and also place that on the table in front of me.

Next, the Rulebooks. I place those on the TV tray to my left. If I have additional copies for the players, I’ll place those in the middle of the table.

I also have a folder of Player Supplies, which are also placed in the middle of the table:

• Blank paper (including graph paper and hex paper)
• Blank character sheets (for an open table; I’ll also remove these once we start playing to reduce clutter)
• Communal maps (which have been drawn by the players and shared with the group)

Also in the campaign box are the Characters. I have a folder for living characters in the campaign and another folder for dead characters. These stay in the box: I generally don’t need to reference them during play, so it’s best to keep them out of the way.

I print out a copy of the Campaign Status Sheet for the current session and also place it on the table in front of me.

Finally, I’ll grab my dice bag and lay out the Dice I need: 2d4, 8d6, 6d8, 2d10, 2d12, 6d20.

• 8d6 for fireballs and lightning bolts.
• 6d8 so that I can roll an entire day’s worth of encounter checks in a single go.
• 6d20 because I can simultaneously roll an entire mob’s attack rolls. (These are generally in three pairs of matching colors, so that I can easily group them for mixed types.)

(See Random GM Tip: Fistfuls of Dice for more advice on rolling and reading lots of dice at the same time.)

Next: Example of Play – Thracian Hexcrawl

Go to Part 1

#5. IMPROVISED RANDOM GENERATORS

Okay, we started by filling the map with every ounce of creative thought we had. Then we started recklessly stealing everything we could lay our hands on. But we’re still staring at empty hexes. Now what?

Now we need to get our creative juices flowing again by rapidly injecting fresh ideas that will break us out of the dried-out box our thinking is currently trapped in. There are a lot of ways to provide this stimuli.

For example, I’ve used Magic the Gathering cards to provide inspiration. In fact, you can use the MTGRANDOM website to generate a random Magic card. Let’s do that a few times and see what we get:

(click for large image)

So what I’m seeing here are some incredibly creepy constructs. Let’s say there’s a bunch of them. They’re harvesting spores from a crop of strange flowers that blossomed in the wake of an meteorite falling to earth. How do these constructs work? Well, looks like brains are being sucked out of people and placed into the constructs. Obviously Kjora there is in charge of the whole operation.

Combine that basic set up with an appropriate map from Dyson Logos and you should be good to go.

Alternatively, grab a random map from Dyson Logos first and then use the Goblin Ampersand to help you figure out what’s happening there by flipping to two random pages in the Monster Manual.

Another option is to repurpose random encounter generators. Sadly, this is a tool lacking in 5^th Edition, but older editions include comprehensive generators that can be used (and a variety third-party options can be found).

For example, using the generators found in the 1^st Edition of AD&D:

1. Roll 1d8 to determine a column on the “Sub-Arctic Conditions” encounter table. I roll a 6, so the result is “Mountains.”
2. Roll 1d100 with a result of 65. That’s a giant owl. According to the 1^st Edition Monster Manual, giant owls appear in groups of 1d4+1. I roll and generate a group of five owls.
3. Giant owls have a treasure type of “Q x 5, X.” I roll on those treasure tables and I get 1 miscellaneous magic, 1 potion, and 1 gem. Rolling on the sub-tables, I get a black pearl (500 gp), a potion of human control, and an amulet of life protection.

Okay, the hex I’m looking at is in the Old Forest, so let’s try something like this:

N7 – TREE OF THE ELDER OWL

A giant tree, over 80 feet wide at its base and towering several hundred feet in the air. Around the base of the tree are a number of strange carvings, intermixed with primitive pictures of owls.

CALL OF THE OWL: Anyone performing an owl call near the base of the tree will cause a hidden door to open, allowing passage into the hollow center of the trunk.

COUNCIL OF OWLS: Within the tree, four giant owls sit on perches. For an appropriate tribute, these owls can each cast augury once per day.

UPPER EYRIE: For a much larger tribute, the Council will have the supplicant remove their arms and armor. Then one of the owls will clutch them by the shoulders and fly them to the upper eyrie where they will be placed before the Elder Owl.

THE ELDER OWL: The left eye of the Elder Owl has been replaced with a black pearl (500 gp) and he wears an amulet of life protection. The Elder Owl will answer questions as per a commune spell, but he is also completely enamored with physical beauty: If someone of particular beauty (Charisma 16+) presents themselves, he will use his potion of human control in an attempt to enslave them.

#6. SPIN-OFFS

Regardless of how you’re stocking a hex, you should keep your mind open to other locations that the current hex suggests.

For example, you’ve got a necromancer in a crystalline spire who’s served by a bunch of goblins he’s charmed by writing arcane runes on the insides of their eyelids and then sewing their eyelids shut. Where’d he get the goblins from? Maybe there’s a village of them living nearby. They protect a tree that bears a single, bright red fruit each year. The fruit has magical properties and each year the necromancer comes to claim the fruit and take away goblin slaves.

Or you’re keying a grotto that a bunch of bandits are using as a hideout. Turns out these bandits have longbows of remarkably high quality. This is because they’re trading with a one-eyed troll who lives in a cave that can only be accessed through a green crystal which thrusts up through the forest floor: Lay your hand upon the crystal, say the magic password, and the crystal becomes intangible. The troll is a master bowyer.

#7. WALK AWAY

Finally, be willing to walk away from the project and take a break: Watch a TV show. Read a book. Flip through some unrelated game manuals. Power up the PS5.

Give your brain a chance to breathe and your creative batteries a chance to recharge.

This is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a comprehensive catalog or definitive technique for keying a hexcrawl. It’s just stuff that’s worked for me while keying hexcrawls.

Back to 5E Hexcrawls

Go to Part 1

On that note, let’s take a closer look at the practical techniques I use when stocking my hexes.

#0. HAVE A MAP

Our primary focus here is stocking hexes. But before you can do that, you need the map you’ll be keying.

First, figure out how big you want your map to be. For the reasons we discussed above, I recommend a 10 x 10 or 12 x 12 map. 100 or 144 hexes should be more than enough to get started.

Second, place the home base for the PCs in the center of this map. (This way, as noted, they can go in any direction without immediately riding off the edge of your prep.) The home base might be:

• A small town or city
• An expedition’s base camp
• A keep
• An outpost
• A dimensional portal
• A crashed spaceship

There’s no limit here except your imagination. The key thing is that the PCs need to have a reason to keep coming back to this location. (This usually means some form of resupplying between one expedition and the next.)

Third, grab some hexmapping software. Current options include:

• Worldographer
• Tiled Map Editor
• Hextml

You can also use other world-mappers and then just drop a hex grid on top of your map, but I recommend creating a true hex map with one clearly defined terrain type per hex. (It will make travel modifiers a lot clearer.)

I also suggest large blocks of similar terrain, which can then immediately double as your regions. (Remember that any individual hex is huge. Just because you threw down “forest” as the predominant terrain type, it doesn’t mean there isn’t a lot of local variation within it.)

Finally, I recommend having two or three different types of terrain immediately adjacent to the home base: If the PCs go north, they enter the mountains. If they go west, they enter the forest. If they head south or east they’re crossing the plains. This gives a clear and immediate distinction which provides a bare minimum criteria that the PCs can use to “pick a direction and go.”

Fourth, throw down some roads and rivers.

You’re done.

#1. BE CREATIVE, BE AWESOME, BE SINCERE

Before we get into any tips, tricks, shortcuts, or cheats, first things first: Do some honest brainstorming and pour some raw creativity onto the page.

The neat ideas you’ve been tossing around inside your head for the past few days? Everything your players think would be cool? Everything you think would be cool? Everything you wish the last GM you played with had included in the game?

Put ‘em in hexes.

Then think about the setting logically: What needs to be there in order for the setting to work? For the stuff you’ve already keyed to work?

Get ‘em in hexes.

Bring your creativity to the table. And make sure everything you include is awesome, because life is too short to waste time on the mediocre or the “good enough” or the “I guess I need to do that.” If there’s something that feels mundane or generic, give it a twist or add something extra. (The Goblin Ampersand can be a good technique here.)

Finally, throughout this entire process, be sincere. I think it’s really important to stay true to yourself when you’re doing design work: You have a unique point of view and a unique aesthetic. Even when you’re bringing in material or inspiration from other sources, apply it through your own perspective and values.

#2. JUMP AROUND

It can be useful to start at Hex A1, go to Hex A2, and then systematically proceed on through the A’s before starting the B’s.

But if you’re working on A3 and you get a cool idea that belongs on the other side of the map, don’t hesitate: Jump over there and key up Hex F7.

That is not only useful from a practical standpoint: It also feels great when you get to column F and discover three-quarters of the hexes have already been filled.

#3. STEAL

Okay, you’ve filled a couple dozen hexes, but now you’re starting to run out of ideas. What next?

Steal.

If you’re reading this blog, I’m guessing you’ve got a stack of adventures that you’ve collected over the years. Go pull your favorite location-based adventures off the shelf and start plopping them down into your hexes.

For example, consider the 5E adventure anthologies. Tales From the Yawning Portal has:

• The Sunless Citadel
• The Forge of Fury
• The Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan
• White Plume Mountain
• Dead in Thay (The Doomvault)
• Against the Giants (Hill Giant Stronghold)
• Tomb of Horrors

All of these locations could be dropped directly into your hexcrawl, although you might want to push the last three into hexes beyond your initial map as long-term goals for the PCs to work towards.

Next, flip open your copy of Candlekeep Mysteries:

• Book of Ravens (Chalet Brantifax)
• A Deep and Creeping Darkness (Vermeillon)
• Price of Beauty (Temple of the Restful Lily)
• Zikran’s Zephyrean Tome (Zikran’s Laboratory)
• Zikran’s Zephyrean Tome (Haunted Cloud Giant Keep)

And just like that, we’ve keyed twelve more hexes.

Old school editions featured a lot of these “here’s a cool location” adventures, so if you’re willing to adapt material you can unlock 50 years worth of cool options. In my Thracian Hexcrawl, for example, I used:

• Caverns of Thracia
• S3 Expedition to the Barrier Peaks
• B3 Palace of the Silver Princess
• Temple of Elemental Evil
• L3 Deep Dwarven Delve
• Return to White Plume Mountain
• Touched by the Gods

And more.

Having 30+ years of collecting to fall back on is nice, of course. But even if you don’t have that kind of gaming library, you can find a ton of great stuff online for free. For example, the One Page Dungeon Contest is basically an all-you-can-eat smorgasboard for this sort of thing; I’ve already mentioned Dyson Logos’ maps (only one of many free map resources); and so forth.

#4. STEAL MORE

No. Seriously. Go steal stuff. Pillage and loot with wild abandon.

Not every adventure can be dropped straight into a hex, but even adventures that aren’t explicitly location-based will often feature cool locations that you can ripped out and easily adapted.

And the more you’re willing to adapt, the more you’ll be able to use. For example, “The Joy of Extradimensional Spaces” in Candlekeep Mysteries features Fistandia’s Mansion, an extradimensional sanctum accessible from a magical book in Candlekeep.

• Drop the extradimensional component and you can drop the whole building into a hex.
• Change the extradimensional access point to a statue or shrine or giant magic rune carved into the wall of a box canyon and you can drop that into a hex.
• Give the mansion multiple magical access points and you can drop them into multiple (And you might as well toss the original magic book into a dungeon’s treasure horde somewhere, too.)

Grab any non-urban 5E campaign book you’re not interested in running and you’ll be able to continue harvesting. From Hoard of the Dragon Queen, for example, you could grab:

• The village of Greenest as the campaign’s home base
• Raider Camp (p. 16)
• Dragon Hatchery (p. 23)
• Carnath Roadhouse (p. 41)
• Castle Naerytar (p. 43)
• Hunting Lodge (p. 62)
• Skyreach Castle (p. 76)

As you’re harvesting material like this, you may start to notice patterns. For example, we’ve got a bunch of giant-related content now:

• Hill Giant Stronghold (from Tales of the Yawning Portal)
• Haunted Cloud Giant Keep (from Candlekeep Mysteries)
• Skyreach Castle (cloud giants from Hoard of the Dragon Queen)

How could we hook the lore of these locations together?

Also, when you’re harvesting material from a campaign book, you’re jettisoning the original connective material between the locations (which was probably some sort of linear plot), but the lore connections are still there. You can go one step further and strip those out, too. (Usually by adapting or genericizing them into something else.) But you usually don’t have to: By plopping them into a hexcrawl, you’ve effectively remixed the original adventure. In fact, you can use node-based scenario design to diversify these connections. Check out How to Remix an Adventure to trivially add even more depth to your hexcrawl. (You can, of course, use these same techniques to link up other hex keys, too.)

Another resource I love for this are back issues of Dungeon magazine. Sadly these are harder to come by these days, but each issue usually had a half dozen different adventures. Some could be dropped directly into hexes; others could be easily harvested for locations.

For example, let’s flip open Dungeon #65:

1. “Knight of the Scarlet Sword.” This adventure details the Village of Bechlaughter and the magical silver dome in the center of the village which serves as home to a lich. Use the whole village or just use the dome.
2. “Knight of the Scarlet Sword” also contains the Caves of Cuwain — the tomb of a banshee. Another location that can be used as a key entry.
3. “Flotsam” is a side trek featuring a couple of pirates who pretend to be legitimate merchants; they lure people onto their ship by offering legitimate passage and then rob them on the high seas. It doesn’t seem immediately appropriate for a forest hex key, but what if the PCs found this ship — and its weird, seemingly crazy crew — just sitting in the middle of the forest? Maybe it’s a witch’s curse or a strange haunting. Or just crazy people.
4. “The Ice Tyrant” is a heavily plotted adventure, but we could start by ripping out the fully-mapped Lodge and placing it along any convenient road that needs an inn.
5. “The Ice Tyrant” also contains a map for a Sentinel Tower occupied by evil dwarves. This can also be dropped straight into a hex. (Could it be connected with the dark dwarves from “The Forge of Fury” that we used earlier?)
6. “The Ice Tyrant” finally features the Keep of Anghanor — guarded by a white dragon and containing a bunch of bad guys. (Could this dragon be related to the dragon cults from the Hoard of the Dragon Queen locations?)
7. “Reflections” is another side trek, this one involving a cavern where a will o’ wisp has imprisoned a gibbering mouther. That’s another hex done!
8. “Unkindness of Raven” is a location-based adventure triggered by stumbling across Crawford Manor while wandering through the wilderness. This is easy!
9. “The Beast Within” is a location-based adventure triggered by stumbling across a werewolf’s cottage in the wilderness. Plop it in!

And there you go. One random issue of Dungeon and you’ve got another nine hexes keyed. Pick up a dozen issues and you could probably key a full 10 x 10 hex map entirely from the magazine.

Go to Part 3: Further Inspiration

One of the principles of the Alexandrian Hexcrawl is that you key geography. In other words, your hex key features locations, not encounters. (Encounters are handled separately.) The distinction between a “location” and an “encounter” can get a little hazy if you stare at it for too long, but in practice it’s usually pretty obvious: If your key reads “an ogre walking down the road,” then the next time the PCs pass along that road the ogre will presumably be gone (particularly if they’ve killed it). If your key instead reads “an ogre living in a shack,” then even if the PCs kill the ogre, the shack will still be there.

Of course, one might argue that the PCs could do some quick demolition work on the shack and make it disappear, too. (That would be an excellent example of staring at the distinction for too long.) But the general point remains: You’re looking to key permanent geography, not ephemeral events.

Another key principle is that every hex is keyed. This can be a daunting prospect. When I created my Thracian Hexcrawl, for example, I started with a 16 x 16 hex map. That meant I needed to key 256 individual hexes.

My experience with that hexcrawl taught me that you can (and almost certainly should!) start with a smaller map. I generally recommend a 10 x 10 hex map, for a total of 100 hexes, with the PCs’ home base in the center of the map. The key thing, though, if you’ll pardon the pun, is that you want enough hexes so that the PCs can head in any direction and NOT fall off the edge of your map in the first session. Based on my practical experience, that distance appears to be roughly 5 hexes.

In the Avernian Hexcrawl, for example, I used a 10 x 6 map. I could get away with this because:

• There were mountains on the northern and southern edges of the ‘crawl, acting as natural obstacles that would tend to focus PCs on the large valley between them; and
• This hexcrawl features a map of the region which is given to the PCs. Although the PCs are not prohibited from moving beyond the edge of the map, such maps tend to also focus the PCs’ explorations.

The advantage, of course, is that I only needed to prep 60 hexes.

Similarly, Ben Robbins’ West Marches campaign featured an explicit limit: The home base was located on the western edge of civilization, and the PCs could go anywhere they wanted… as long as it was west into the unknown. If you used a similar set up for your campaign, you could effectively halve the number of hexes you need to key.

But whether we’re talking about 50 or 60 or 100 or 256 hexes, that’s still a lot of hexes. How can you get all of them prepped? It seems like a lot of work!

First, to be brutally honest, it is a lot of work. The prep for a hexcrawl is frontloaded: It’s a structure that requires you to put a lot of work in up front, with the pay-off that it requires very little prep to keep the campaign in motion once you start playing. (For example, with my Thracian hexcrawl I spent 2-3 intense weeks prepping the hex key, but then ran dozens of sessions with no additional prep beyond 5-10 minutes at the beginning of each session. Your mileage may vary.)

Second, because of that frontloaded prep, you should make sure that a hexcrawl is really the right structure for what you’re trying to do. There is a perception that “wilderness travel = hexcrawl” and that’s not really true. The hexcrawl structure is designed for exploration, and is really only appropriate if you expect the PCs to be constantly re-engaging with the same region. (This can make them ideal for an open table, where you’ll have multiple groups engaging the same region.) If the PCs are only traveling through a region or exploring it once or twice, then you’re going to end up prepping lots and lots of hexes that never get used, and that’s not smart prep.

Third, with all that being said, it may not be as much work as you might think. There’s a couple secrets to that.

The first secret is that, when you’re prepping material for yourself, polish is overrated. (Details are also overrated, with the proviso that essential details and awesome details should always be jotted down.) For example, if I were writing up a dungeon behind a waterfall for someone else to use, I’d probably take the time to mention how wet and slick the stairs leading down into the dungeon are; the damp moistness in the air of the first chamber (providing a slight haze that can be burnt away dramatically by a fireball trap); and the way the dampness gives way to a chilled condensation that hangs in glistening drops from the rough hewn walls as you descend into the dungeon.

But since I’m prepping this for myself, I don’t need to write that down.

Trust your own voice as a GM. During play, based on your intrinsic understanding of the scenario and the environment, it will provide the logical and evocative details you need to flesh things out. And by placing trust in yourself, you can save yourself a ton of prep time.

The second secret is that the amount of detail required to key a hex can vary quite a bit. You can use minimal keys. Just because something is geography, it doesn’t mean that it has to be elaborate. Something can be brief without being ephemeral. There can be a perception that every hex “should” have a 20-room dungeon in it. But remember that ogre’s shack? Your key doesn’t have to be any more complicated than that. Some times, it can be even less complicated!

SAMPLE HEX KEYS

We’re going to take a look at some actual hex keys I’ve prepped for my own hexcrawls. The goal here is to demonstrate the range of different key types that I use, so let’s start with the shortest:

B4. RED RUTH’S LAIR (Descent Into Avernus, p. 107)

Red Ruth has a heartstone.

This one is pretty simple: I’ve grabbed a location from a pre-existing adventure (in this case, Descent Into Avernus) and plugged it straight into the hexcrawl. If the PCs encounter this hex, I can just pull out the appropriate book and start running it.

In this case, I’ve also included a short note modifying the original adventure. (The NPC named Red Ruth has a heartstone.) You may not need such notes at all. In other cases, you might have several such notes. Whatever works.

Here’s another simple one:

K13 – RUINED TEMPLE OF ILLHAN

See hex detail.

This location was too detailed to include in my primary hex key. (Generally, I’ll bump anything longer than a single page out of the primary hex key. In my experience, it keeps the hex key cleaner and much easier to use.)

Much like the published adventure, I’m telling myself to go look somewhere else for the detailed adventure. In this case, it’s an adventure I wrote myself.

I keep these detailed adventure notes in a separate file folder, labeled and organized by hex number. For shorter published adventures, I’ll keep print outs of the adventures in the same file folder.

The details of the Ruined Temple of Illhan were previously posted here on the site. They can be found here. (The presentation there is slightly more polished than what would have been found in my original notes, but is substantially similar.)

B5 – BONE CRATER

A large meteor impact formed by a huge skull (more than ten feet across) that’s partially embedded in the center of the crater.

This is an example of what I think of as a landmark. Sometimes these landmarks are more involved or have hidden features to them, but generally they’re just single points of interest distinct from the surrounding wilderness. Regardless of their other characteristics, they’re almost always useful for PCs trying to orient their maps.

N15 – RECENT FOREST FIRE

Landscape is scorched. No foraging is possible in this hex.

Another short one. This is basically similar to a landmark, but it covers a vast swath of territory. (In this case, an entire hex.)

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; has preferred to stay away from intelligent prey ever since. (MM, p. 303)

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

A simple monster lair. I usually don’t bother with maps for this sort of thing: It’s easy enough to improvise a cave or shack or, in this case, a shaft. In fact, many smaller complexes with a half dozen rooms or less can also be managed without difficulty. (Assuming there’s nothing radically unusual about them, of course.) Alternatively, you might use a random floorplan generator or similar tool.

(Note the page reference. I know Wizards of the Coast is terrified of page numbers on the off-chance that they get changed in a future printing, but why not make life a little easier for your future self?)

F15 – SKULL ROCK (on river)

A rock shaped like a skull thrusts out of the river. Crawling through the mouth leads to a crypt.

AREA 1: Mummified red dragon’s head (huge). Breathes flame that fills most of the room (fireball, DC 14). Secret entrance to treasure chamber lies under the head.

AREA 2: 5 wights, 50% in lair (MM, p. 300). The two rooms off this area have been pillaged.

AREA 3 – BURIAL OFFERINGS: 3000 gp, 3 golden spinels (200 gp each)

AREA 4: Trapped hallway. Arrows shoot from wall and alchemist’s fire from nozzles in the ceiling. (Chamber to the left has an incense burner in the shape of a squat, fat man worth 70 gp.)

AREA 5: Wight (MM, p. 300), no life drain but can detect magic, life, and invisibility. (Sniffs out magic and lusts for it.)

AREA 6: Bas relief skull. Insane. Asks incredibly bad riddles. (“What flies in the air?” “A bird.”), but then blasts those who answer with 1d6 magic missiles regardless.

AREA 7: Slain wights.

AREA 8: Staked vampires.

AREA 9: A lich (MM, p. 202) has been chained to the wall. Arcs of purple electricity spark off him in eternal torment. (Stripped of spellcasting and legendary actions.)

Notice the “on river” designator next to the key title here. That indicates that this location is on the river flowing through this hex on the map: If the PCs are following the river, they’ll automatically encounter this location.

This sort of fully-keyed “mini-dungeon” represents pretty much the upper limit of what I’ll handle in a hex key entry before bumping it into a separate document.

The map here is taken from Dyson Logos’ website. His site has repeatedly proven invaluable to me when stocking hexcrawls.

Go to Part 2: Stocking Your Hexes