On page 33 of the Infinity roleplaying game, there is an “Advanced Rule” in a box:

As an advanced rule, instead of using a group pool for saved Momentum each PC can save Momentum and use it later individually. Players who have saved Momentum can spend it at any time to assist the actions of other player characters (or NPC allies) and otherwise influence the scene. At any given time, a player can save a maximum of six Momentum. In addition, any single action can benefit from a maximum of six saved Momentum. (For example, if two players had both saved four Momentum each, they still wouldn’t be able to spend all eight Momentum on a single action.) During Momentum depletion, each character loses 1 Momentum.

This is presented as an optional rule, but the truth is that, in my opinion and based on countless hours of playtesting, it is the only way that people should be playing the 2d20 System.

Let’s back up for a second and talk about how Momentum works in the 2d20 System, which was created by Jay Little for Mutant Chronicles and then also used in Infinity, Conan, John Carter of Mars, and Star Trek Adventures. When you resolve an action test in 2d20, you determine a target number based on Attribute + Skill and then you roll a pool of d20 dice — generally starting with 2d20, but expandable to 3d20, 4d20, 5d20, etc. You generate one success per die that rolls under the target number, plus an additional success if the roll is under the pertinent skill’s Focus. (So even if you’re only rolling 2d20, you’re often capable of generating up to four successes.) You succeed on the check if you score a number of successes equal to the difficulty of the task — so if the difficulty is 2, you need to generate two successes to succeed.

Here’s the final wrinkle: If you score MORE successes than you need to succeed at the task, those extra successes are converted into Momentum, which can be spent to enhance the current action or saved and spent later to gain bonuses to future checks, create obstacles for opponents, and other special effects.

At first glance, this seems fairly unremarkable. But in actual practice, it’s a really interesting system to GM for. As I wrote in the GM advice section of Infinity:

…setting a precise difficulty level is not a significant feature of the game. In fact, at least 95% of the time you will basically be deciding whether a task is of Average (D1) difficulty or Challenging (D2) difficulty. (The higher difficulty ratings of Daunting, Dire, and Epic obviously exist, but can be incredibly difficult or even impossible for some characters to achieve under normal circumstances. As such, they should be rare in their application.)

The reason for this is because the Infinity system is far less interested in the simple binary of passing or failing a check, and is instead intensely interested in the quality of your success, which is measured and leveraged through the use of Momentum.

So whereas a GM running D&D or Numenera or Feng Shui 2 is often giving a lot of thought to what the specific numerical value of difficulty for a particular test should be, the GM of a 2d20 game is instead generally just asking, “Is this check unusually hard?” If yes, then difficulty 2. If no, then difficulty 1. The mechanical focus of the game is (or, at least, should be) all in how Momentum is used after the check.

GROUP vs. INDIVIDUAL MOMENTUM

This brings us to saving Momentum. As noted, any Momentum generated by a check that isn’t immediately spent can instead be saved to be used in the future. The mechanical difference we’re talking about is whether you:

• put your saved Momentum into a group pool, from which any player can pull Momentum to spend; or
• put your saved Momentum into a personal pool which you control

The distinction between these points has little or no impact on game balance. Personal pools can theoretically allow a group to save more total Momentum, but in practice this rarely happens, it’s counterbalanced by the fact that every pool ablates a point of Momentum at the end of each scene (so the group loses saved Momentum faster), and the amount of saved Momentum that can be spent on a single check is capped at the same amount.

(We also playtested a variant which was completely equivalent mechanically: Total saved Momentum in the group is capped at 6 and the group collectively chooses which saved Momentum is lost during scene ablation. This makes bookkeeping more complicated and also tends to result in a pointless little “Momentum dance” where players spend their saved Momentum in order to open up cap space for the current player to save their Momentum.)

So if it’s basically mathematically equivalent, what’s the big deal?

Primarily, off-turn player engagement.

Consider a typical combat system: Everybody rolls an initiative and, when their initiative comes around, they take their turn. What happens when it’s not their turn? They just wait for it to be their turn again. The longer the wait, the more likely it is that they will become bored or tune out.

You can counteract this by giving players off-turn engagement. I discuss one example of this in The Design History of Saving Throws: D&D saving throws mechanically engage a player (i.e., let them roll dice) when it is not their turn. It’s a very basic form of engagement and doesn’t involve player agency, but it is physically engaging and that’s enough to break up the routine “it’s not my turn” cycle of tuning out.

When you used a group pool of saved Momentum that anyone can pull from, the player generating that Momentum gives up ownership of it. The only player engaged when the Momentum is used is the active player who is choosing to pull from the pool.

But if you use personal pools, then the player who controls the saved Momentum has off-turn engagement when they spend it to help the active player. This is off-turn engagement with the dial turned all the way up, because even when they’re not actively spending Momentum, the player is constantly looking for the opportunity to do so.

The other factor here is ownership. When a player dumps Momentum into a group pool it is almost immediately anonymized. When that Momentum is later spent by another player, the original player doesn’t feel any ownership over that; they don’t feel the direct connection between the thing that they did and the thing that the current player is doing. When Momentum is spent from a personal pool, on the other hand, the player has immediate and visceral agency. This usually also bleeds into the game world, with the player spending the Momentum explaining how their character is actually contributing to the current action.

This sense of collective contribution to success creates a group camaraderie that, once again, tends to transcend the specific moments in which Momentum is spent: The group is mechanically encouraged to view their successes collectively and take action collaboratively instead of focusing on individual accomplishments.

DESIGN HISTORY

So if I feel this strongly about personal pools being the correct approach for Infinity, why is it pushed off into an optional sidebar?

That’s a complicated question.

When I first became the Lead Developer for the Infinity RPG, the only 2d20 game in print was Mutant Chronicles. I was handed a mechanically complete lifepath system (that needed setting content slotted into it, but should otherwise not be touched) and a half-finished system that needed to be finished. So I spent a couple of months doing that and then turned my attention to developing the setting material for the core rulebook and the scenarios for Adventures in the Human Sphere, Quantronic Heat, and other supplements.

It was at this point, however, that the development process hit several problems. Basically, right around the time that I was declaring Infinity to be “system locked” (like picture lock for a film, I think of system lock as being the point where the mechanics are nailed down to the point where you can confidently develop supplementary material) there was a simultaneous project inside Modiphius to develop an internal 2d20 SRD that would create consistency between all published versions of the game.

In developing the Infinity version of the 2d20 System there were a couple key design principles I had established.

First, because we were going to be developing full-fledged systems for Warfare, Infowar, and Psywar, I felt it was important to streamline and simplify the core of the system. The complexity of the game would come from having these robust scenario/game structures, and therefore other sources of complexity in the system should be smoothed out.

Second, the 2d20 System in Mutant Chronicles — like the pre-Genesys system Little had designed before it — features a set of core mechanics designed to empower players and give GMs tools for making powerful, robust rulings, but then surrounds those mechanics with a ton of mechanically crunchy specificity. The core mechanics of the Momentum system, for example, are beautifully designed to empower player creativity and improvisation, but then the system works relentlessly to lock that down by providing a laundry list of specifically defined ways that you’re allowed to spend the Momentum. My own design predilections, on the other hand, lean the other way: Ditch all the hand-holding and just leave the powerful core structures.

These two principles worked well with each other: Focusing on cruft-free core structures simultaneously simplified the mechanical core so that it could be developed through the new functionality of Infowar and Psywar rather than a lot of situational rules.

But the principles didn’t work well with the new guiding principle of unifying all 2d20 System design to match the new SRD. The result was a tug of war for the heart and identity of the game, complicated immensely because we had a dozen freelancers working on supplemental material that had to be constantly revised every time the core mechanics were violently yanked in a new direction.

I won some of those battles. I lost others. In the end, the only way I could keep the personal Momentum pools that I felt so passionately about in the game was as an optional rule, and even that was a fight.

But, seriously, if you’re running a 2d20 game — any 2d20 game! — swap to personal Momentum pools.

Buy!

I’ve talked about Numenera and the Cypher System it spawned quite a bit in the past, both here on the Alexandrian and elsewhere. Often what I’m talking about are the GM intrusions, which are one of the best and most innovative elements of the system.

When saying that intrusions are innovative, however, I’m not infrequently confronted by people demanding stuff like, “Have you ever read any Fate game at all?” It’s an ironic comment because it’s an accusation of ignorance which is, in fact, born from ignorance. But it’s happened often enough that I feel a need to just write up a definitive explanation that I can reference in the future.

First: Yes, I’m familiar with and have played (and run) Fate.

Second: Yes, both games feature a mechanic in which the GM offers a point of meta-currency to a player to achieve an effect which the player can cancel by spending their own meta-currency. But the similarity is superficial, in much the same way that saying “in Magic: The Gathering you play cards from your hand and in Dominion you also play cards from your hand” is a superficial comparison of those games.

Let’s break this down.

GM INTRUSIONS

I discuss the GM intrusions of the Cypher System in much more detail in The Art of GM Intrusions, but the short version is that the function of a GM intrusion is for the GM to say, “I’m going to do something that the rules don’t normally allow me to do.”

GMs will, of course, do this from time to time in any system. But there’s generally a limit. For example, if a GM’s response to a successful attack in a typical RPG was to say, “Yeah! And you hit the mammoth-saur so hard that your axe actually gets stuck in its side! And then it rears back and rips the axe right out of hands!” the players would generally say (or at least think), “This is bullshit.” Because punishing people for making a successful attack is bullshit; it’s a violation of the rules we’ve all agreed to abide by.

But hitting something so hard that your weapon gets stuck in it is actually pretty fucking badass. And what the GM intrusion mechanics basically let the GM say is, “Wouldn’t this be cool?” (by offering XP) and for the players to say, “Fuck yeah!” (by accepting the XP) or “No, I don’t think so,” (by spending an XP to cancel the intrusion) within the rules we’ve all agreed to abide by.

We could, of course, just chat this out without the mechanic, but (a) you can really say that about any mechanic in an RPG and (b) in practice, making it an explicit mechanic lubricates the interaction so that play doesn’t bog down on these points.

This simultaneously lets Monte Cook, the designer, keep the system streamlined by binning all the special case rules. The example he gives in the book basically boils down to, “The reason other games have attack of opportunity rules is to eliminate weird edge cases where turn-based combat creates odd and undesirable outcomes like being unable to stop someone from running past you because it’s not your turn. Instead of having a whole heap of special case rules trying to weed out those corner cases, the GM should just use the intrusion mechanic to deal with them when and if they’re important.”

Basically, any time the rules would discourage something awesome from happening or result in one of these weird edge cases due to their streamlined abstraction, the GM instrusion provides a mechanism for resolving it.

FATE COMPELS

Let’s compare this to Fate in which the GM can identify a specific Aspect belonging to a character and compel it by paying a Fate Point to the player. (And the player, in turn, can cancel the compel by instead spending a Fate Point of their own.)

As we’ve noted, the form of the mechanic is superficially similar. But the function of the mechanic has a completely different feature set.

I’ve been spending a lot of time with the Dresden Files RPG lately, so we’ll use that as our primary example. It includes two types of compels: Limitations and Complications. Limitations are the GM forcing the player to take a specific type of action (which, you’ll note, is not something that GM intrusions do at all). Complications are similar to one variety of GM intrusion (by introducing elements that are disadvantageous to the PCs during play), but note how the actual execution of the mechanic is almost completely inverted: Compelling an Aspect isn’t providing mechanical support for unanticipated edge cases; they’re explicitly the core rule by which Aspects (which are one of the primary ways of describing your character mechanically) are mechanically implemented.

Here’s one way to clearly perceive the distinction: If you took GM intrusions out of the Cypher System, nothing on your character sheet would change. If you took compels out of Fate, you’d have a whole bunch of negative-leaning Aspects on your character sheet without any mechanical hook for using them.

WHY DOES THIS MATTER?

Because the misapprehension that GM intrusions are supposed to be used like compels in Fate appears to be causing a lot of Fate players to misuse and dismiss one of the most useful innovations in RPG design in the last decade.

If you believe that GM intrusions are just “watered down compels from Fate” (as one Fate player told me), it means that you’re not only limiting your use of GM intrusions to one very tiny part of what they’re capable of, you’re also saddling the GM intrusion mechanic with an entire ethos (being the primary mechanism for leveraging character traits into play) which GM intrusions are not mechanically capable of robustly supporting (because, again, that’s not what they’re designed to do).

The opposite, of course, would also be true: If you tried to use Fate compels as if they were GM intrusions, the result would almost certainly be a very sub-optimal use of the Fate system. However, I don’t think I’ve ever seen this in actual play or online discussions, which is why my discussion here is primarily focused in the opposite direction.

Here’s a convenient fiction that’s often perceived as reality: That countries as they exist today are immutable truths.

We talk of the “history of France,” for example, as if the borders of France have not been in constant upheaval since… well, forever.

Whether we’re browsing the table of contents in a world history textbook, reading Wikipedia articles, or running our finger along a shelf full of history books, we see this all the time. I just got done reading the Cambridge History of Russia, for example.

We accept this fiction as truth not only because it’s historically convenient, but also because it’s politically expedient: It’s much easier to maintain power if you create the illusion that your power is a fundamental facet of reality.

Look at China, for example, which claims an unbroken legacy of civilization dating back to the 21st century BCE despite any casual inspection of their history revealing that this is nonsense. (Even if you ignore the fact that the current Communist government only dates back to the middle of last century, you can also check out the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period as just one example from the “History of China” in which the entire region of the “oldest country in the world” was a hodgepodge of a dozen or more polities.)

Now, in the context of RPG worldbuilding (because that’s the sort of thing we talk about around here), this can be useful to keep in mind in a couple of ways.

HISTORICAL. Use the “national illusion” when writing the history of your campaign world. How disparate nations are forged together or broken apart can be a vibrant part of that history, with repercussions that directly affect the world as the characters know it.

This rich depth can be too easily overlooked with grandiloquent statements like, “And then the nation of Such-and-So was born.”

But don’t forget the converse reality of this: National identity persists. Rome didn’t die its final death until it was in several different pieces and no longer anywhere in the vicinity of Rome.

IMMEDIATE. The conception and identity of nations isn’t just a matter of historical convenience. They shape and are used to shape the political struggles of today.

Look, for example, at Ukraine: In one narrative it is an independent nation with its own history. In another, it’s part of Russia and has been for 1,200 years. In fact, it’s such a part of Russia that the story of Russian history typically begins in Kiev.

That ideological struggle for the identity of a nation creates a vibrant cesspool of conflict and, therefore, story.

All kinds of stories: Patriotism. War. Intrigue. Scandal.

EXAMPLE: ANCIENT GREECE

Consider Ancient Greece. When thinking of Greek myth, art, philosophy, or theater, I often think of Greece as being… well, modern Greece.

My conception of “Greece” as a thing which exists is strongly wedded to its modern incarnation and how I have encountered it countless times on maps, in news stories, and so forth. But consider this:

Aristotle described the constitutional history of 158 Greek city-states, but there were a thousand more. Each contributed in commerce, industry, and thought to what we mean by Greece.

Will Durant, The Story of Civilization, Vol. 2: The Life of Greece

This much grander conception of Greece as 158 city-states cuts both ways.

First, it reminds us that Greek civilization was vast. They founded the cites of Nice and Marseilles, for example, and Sicily was a major seat of Greek culture. Look at the truly old nations and civilizations of your game world and think about where they’ve been in the past. (There’s virtually no nation on the planet today, for example, which did not at one time claim sovereignty over territory which it no longer possesses.)

Nations contract. In my D&D campaign world, for example, the borders of the Seyrunian Empire have been slowly retreating for a couple of centuries: An orcish horde overran their eastern lands. The Elven War drove them out of their colonies in the Borderlands. After another war they were forced to split control of Corinthia and the Southern Pass with the kingdoms of Barund and Arathia.

Second, it reminds us that “Ancient Greece” wasn’t monolithic. Quite the opposite, in fact. The entirety of Greek history was filled with fractious conflict and division between its many parts. What we now perceive as “Greece” would, at many points in its history, been perceived as a much more complicated (and interesting!) morass of competing polities.

Any number of histories of the Hundred Years War between France and England get tripped up on this, for example, because their authors see “France” as an immutable entity. The history begins to make a lot more sense when you realize that the Carolingian empire had been falling apart for centuries and what you really had was an incredibly complicated struggle of both war and inheritance law between the kingdoms of England, West Francia, Burgundy, and Aquitaine as they all sought a post-Carolingian identity.

Nations are complex entities. Think of them as such: Look at how they amalgamated disjointed polities. Look at the cultural and racial divisions that are papered over by central rule and/or national identity. Think about which languages are spoken and where. Think about economic boundaries.

These fault lines are often hidden by the “national illusion,” but they tend to be an ever-present rumble throughout history and break out into full-fledged earthquakes at the most unexpected times.

FLIP IT AROUND: THE ETERNITY OF GREECE

The easy lesson to take away here is that nations are complex entities made up of a lot of different parts and the existence of the nation as a unified reality is an illusion that we should ignore.

But you can just as easily take this in the other direction. For example, I wrote:

Look at China, for example, which claims an unbroken legacy of civilization dating back to the 21st century BCE despite any casual inspection of their history revealing that this is nonsense.

But is it nonsense? Or is it only nonsense if we view it the way we typically view European history?

What if we flip this around and interpret European history using the same memetic constructs that we use when interpreting Chinese history?

Here’s how that might look:

Greek civilization can be traced back to Mycenae in the 16th century BCE. It rapidly expanded until invasions by the Sea People along with economic and environmental factors caused power to become decentralized during the so-called Homeric Age from the 12th to 8th century BCE.

As a new Athenian hegemony began to emerge, Greece expanded into the Magna Graecia (southern Italy and Sicily), Asia Minor, and Iberia. This brought them into conflict with the Persians in the east and the Carthaginians in the west. The Greeks won major victories against both, however, in a series of wars.

Power slowly began to drift west into Italy as the local barbarians adopted Greek custom, mythology, and culture. Rome, one of the city-states of Magna Graecia, grew increasingly powerful. It was actually Roman armies that won the definitive Greek victory against Carthage.

Following the Battle of Corinth in 146 BC, the first era of fractious, shared rule by multiple Greek city-states was brought definitively to an end and a new capital was established in Rome.

By the 4th century AD, democracy had become imperial rule. The emperor Constantine the Great converted Greek’s official religion from the Olympian gods to the monotheism of Christianity (which remains the dominant religion throughout Greece today).

The Roman era of Greek history continued until the 5th century AD when centuries of territorial loss culminated in the capital being moved back east to Byzantium (which had originally been founded in the 6th century BCE by Megaran Greeks).

We then enter an era commonly referred to as the Four Kingdoms, although some argue for Three or Six Kingdoms. During this period of political disunity, Greece was in all respects a multi-state system split between Byzantium (renamed Constantinople), the Carolingian dynasty, the Germanic dynasty, and the Kievan dynasty.

Arguments can be made for including Britain and Spain in the list of Greek kingdoms. Britain’s long claims to the Frankish dynasty along with the significant influence of Frankish dynasty culture certainly argue for its inclusion, as do Spain’s close ties to the shared state religion of Christianity.

Whether Greece was Three, Four, or Six Kingdoms during this period, however, they frequently formed military alliances against the Persians while simultaneously fighting fractious wars against each other. World War I and World War II, of course, are most logically seen as the modern incarnation of the Peloponnesian Wars which have always been part of Greek history.

Following World War II, the era of Four Kingdoms came to an end and a new union once again unified most of Greek civilization. (This is why discussion of whether the Kievan dynasty “counts” or not is seen as politically divisive. Many Greeks maintain a One Greek policy and insist that only those within the union are Greek.)

The Greeks, of course, have never referred to themselves as such. (The name comes from the Greki, a minor tribe that colonized Italy in the 8th century BC.) Today, they actually use the Greek word “Europe” for their polity. Weird to think about, right?

When I’ve brought this up in the past, some people have misinterpreted this as some sort of alternate history. Not at all: This is exactly history as it occurred in the real world, just interpreted using a different memetic lens. If you can draw a line of identity from the Shang Dynasty to the People’s Republic of China, you can use the same perception of history to draw a line of identity from Mycenae to the European Union.

This, too, is a useful exercise when it comes to worldbuilding. This view of history makes it easy for you to lay out the history of your world in broad strokes and establish major lines of cultural influence.

For example, imagine that you’ve created a fictional world and laid out the history of one of its major civilizations as per the above. You want to add a couple new continents and you decide that the modern nations are primarily descended from colonies established by the Greeks (probably during the Four Kingdoms period so that you can get a bunch of colonial conflicts between the kingdoms). You don’t need to work out all the details of that, though, to know that, for example, the government buildings in North America often feature Greco-Roman architecture.

Robert E. Howard’s “The Hyborian Age” takes a similar approach, summarizing the history of Conan’s world in broad strokes as cultures sweep back and forth across the world in fiery competition with one another.

At any point in this history, of course, you can drill down into the details and find not just “the Greeks”, but all the complexity of the 158 city-states (and beyond).

As described in The Art of the Key, the first published module for D&D was Palace of the Vampire Queen. It used a very simplistic, tabular key:

A year later, Judges Guild would release Wilderlands of High Fantasy, the first published hexcawl. This book keyed only a fraction of the hexes on its map, also using mostly tabular methods:

Different table formats were presented for Lurid Lairs (above), Villages, and Citadels & Castles.

These tablular entries are supplemented with short, one or two sentence entries like these:

1002-Above Ground Ruined Temple-3 Windwalkers

2822-Overgrown Antique Paintings-Copper Dragon

1418 Isle of Grath – Abode of four huge Ogres which relish human flesh. Every Ogre has three eyes, and flaming red hair. A pet giant crocodile follows them to feast on the leavings.

(“Overgrown Antique Paintings” is just a typo. Based on the format of other entries, it should be specifying an overgrown something in which antique paintings are the treasure to be looted from a copper dragon. The image it conjures of a copper dragon living inside magical antique paintings that one can presumably enter is just too fantastic for me not to call it out here. But I digress.)

But whereas the published presentation of dungeons has significantly developed and improved over the last 40+ years, the presentation of hexcrawls largely has not. If you pick up virtually any of the OSR hexcrawls released over the past few years, you’ll still find:

Incomplete keys, in which lots of hexes aren’t keyed at all. This is generally an indication that your hexcrawl is at the wrong scale. This creates two problems in actual play. First, it tends to create very poor pacing (with long spans of time in which navigational decisions are not resulting in interesting feedback in the form of content). Second, the lack of content equates to a lack of structure. One obvious example of this is that hexcrawls with vast spans of empty space lack sufficient landmarks in order to guide navigation.

Underdeveloped keys that aren’t ready for actual play. Telling me that there is, for example, a dungeon in a particular hex with “Hobgoblins 42” in it doesn’t actually give me any meaningful information for bringing that dungeon into play.

Perhaps the most egregious example of this sort of thing are products like Carcosa, which feature keys almost entirely generated by rolling on the random stocking tables found in the back of the book and jotting down the result. There’s zero value in such a key. Why? Because you could just as easily roll on the random stocking tables yourself.

Transitory keys, in which the content keyed to a hex is something you only encounter once and then the hex is functionally empty the next time you go there. (For example, from Isle of the Unknown, “A 9^th-level cleric… in a red surcoat with a white cross rides southeast to take ship upon a holy pilgrimage.”) Because this content effectively deletes itself from the key, over time this transitory content turns even a complete key into an incomplete one. It should instead be encoded as a random encounter (or similar structure).

SO WHAT?

Why is this a problem?

Well, imagine if we designed dungeons this way.

THE TOMB OF SAGRATHEA

Level 1: 12 skeletons.

Level 2: The original laboratories of the lich Sagrathea, now divided into a tribe of 17 ghost eaters and a kingdom of 46 skeletons locked in war with each other.

Level 3: The walls of the Bloodpool Labyrinth are of pinkish flesh which bleeds a grease-like substance if injured. There are many traps here. Patrolled by 2 flaming skulls.

Level 4: [intentionally left blank]

Level 5: [intentionally left blank]

Level 6: 121 skeletons + 4 ogre skeletons.

Level 7 – Sagrathea’s Gardens: A collection of 27 caverns each rendered as a miniature biome. Sagrathea has recorded his spellbook in these gardens, with each garden cavern recording a single spell of the 4^th to 9^th level of potency.

Level 8 – Sagrathea’s Manse: The lich Sagrathea sits upon a throne of black stone with his wight bride.

You can add in a side-view illustration of the dungeon showing each level’s vertical elevation, but if you can imagine looking at this dungeon “key” and being asked to run the Tomb of Sagrathea, then you know how I generally feel when I open up a typical hexcrawl and see the “key” inside.

There’s a real “draw the rest of the fucking owl” vibe to it.

WHAT SHOULD A HEXCRAWL LOOK LIKE?

Published hexcrawls are, in my opinion, providing a poor example of the value a hexcrawl structure is actually capable of providing.

At a basic level, I want to be able to pick up a hexmap and its key and have a fundamentally playable experience.

At a more advanced level, once you have a fully functional hexcrawl, there’s all kinds of cool utility that you can leverage out of that hexcrawl. For example, in Thinking About Wilderness Travel I looked at how the basic scaffolding for rich route-based travel basically just falls out of a properly designed hexcrawl key. Hexcrawls can also provide the context and tools for rapidly restocking empty dungeon complexes, as described in (Re-)Running the Megadunegon.

You can see the sample hex key I included as part of my longer series on hexcrawls.

If you’re looking for something like this on the market right now, check out The Dark of Hot Springs Island by Jacob Hurst, Gabriel Hernandez, Even Peterson, and Donnie Garcia. Every hex is keyed with content. Every lair and dungeon is mapped. And it’s paired to the incredible Field Guide to Hot Springs Island, an incredibly rich handout that’s designed to be given to your players as a kind of rumor table on steroids. It’s not just everything I want in a hexcrawl product; it’s more than that. And it’s the absolute gold standard to which any hexcrawl supplement should aspire.

Back to Hexcrawls

Go to Part 1

“If once we shake off pursuit, I shall make for Weathertop. It is a hill, just to the north of the Road, about half way from here to Rivendell. Gandalf will make for that point, if he follows us. After Weathertop our journey will become more difficult, and we shall have to choose between various dangers.” – Aragorn, Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien)

UNPATHED ROUTES: The basic route system described above assumes that the route follows a clear and unmistakable path — a road or river, for example. Some routes don’t follow paths, however. These generally take the form of a landmark chain: Head north to Archet, then turn east to Weathertop. Turn south from Weathertop, cross the road, and then head west until you hit the road again.

To handle unpathed routes, you’ll need to add mechanics for both (a) getting lost and (b) getting back on track after you’ve become lost. (This may also include a mechanic to determine whether or not you realize that you’re lost.)

A single route can also include both pathed and unpathed sections.

HIDDEN ROUTE FEATURES: The gansōm bridge was washed out by the spring floods, releasing howling water spirits into the Nazharrow River. Before arriving in the Bloodfens, the PCs were unaware of the presence of goblin rovers. They’re pleasantly surprised to discover that the Imperial checkpoint at the Karnic crossroads has been abandoned, its regiment summoned north to deal with peasant rebellions.

Although I mentioned before that PCs need to be aware of distinctions between the available routes in order to make a meaningful choice between them, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they need to know everything. Some aspects of a route’s speed, difficulty, stealth, expense, landmarks, or hazards can be initially hidden from the PCs and only discovered later.

In some cases, hidden route features can be uncovered before the journey begins if the PCs research the route or can get their hands on better maps.

FORKED ROUTES: Sometimes the choice of route (or additional choices of route) can appear after the journey has begun. These can include detours, in which the fork in the route eventually collapses back into the original route.

Detours are often made in response to hidden route features discovered along the way (the gansōm bridge has been washed out, so you need to figure out a different way across the river). PCs can be both pushed and pulled by detours, however: In addition to trying to avoid bad things on the original route, they might also choose to turn aside to gain some benefit (from an advantageous landmark, for example), usually at the cost of time.

PROCEDURAL CONTENT GENERATORS: Procedural content generators are generally nonessential to a scenario structure, but properly designed they can be large boons in content creation and can even unlock unique gameplay. Other than a random encounter table, what other content generators could we potentially develop?

I think one thing we can immediately rule out is trying to develop a map generator. Nothing wrong with a good random map generator, but it doesn’t feel like it’s directly connected to route travel. The assumption of the route system is that you know where Point A is, where Point B is, and what the general routes between them are going to be.

However, you might occasionally faced with a map like this one:

And need to ask yourself, “How can you get from Secomber to Dragonspear Castle?” There’s one obvious route that goes down the Delimbyr River to Daggerford and then along the Trade Way, but is that the only route?

So our first procedural content generator might randomly determine a type of route:

• Road
• River
• Landmark Chain
• Magical

You could bias that so that 1-5 is Road, 6-7 is River, 8-9 is Landmark Chain, and 10 is Magical on a d10 roll. If I literally roll a d10 while sitting at my desk here, I get a 1 and discover that there must be an old, disused road that crosses the High Moor. (It might be a remnant of the Netherese Empire.)

Let’s go back to the Secomber-Daggerford-Dragonspear Castle route on the map above. Remembering that a route is largely defined by the sequence of landmarks spaced along its length, we can see at the moment that the only landmark we know about is the city-state of Daggerford. So perhaps we develop a landmark generator. You could randomly determine a number of landmarks (perhaps 1d6+1) for a given route, and then generate specific landmarks in various categories:

• Settlement (town, village, fortress, shrine, inn)
• Ruin
• Lair
• Route Feature (bridge, wall, tunnel, toll, fork in the path)
• Natural Landmark

There’s likely other categories to be explored, and you can also easily dive down into any number of detailed sub-tables for each of these categories.

Now that you have a list of landmarks for the route, you might want to think about how those landmarks relate to the route itself. A landmark doesn’t necessarily need to be directly on the road, for example, so we could randomly determine the landmark connection:

• On Route
• Detectable From Route (sight, smell, sound)
• Detour (you have to leave the route in order to visit/see the landmark)

As you’re generating landmarks, you may want to get a better sense of how they connect to the wider world. So you might use a path generator to determine if the landmark is functionally a crossroads for many different routes or if it can only be reached along the road, river, or other route that the PCs are currently following.

You can use any number of methods to determine the presence/number of routes connected to the landmark, then randomly determine the type of route (see above), and then use a d8 for compass direction or d6 for hex direction to randomly determine the rough direction of the route.

Where do these other routes go? Unless the PCs express interest, you don’t necessarily need to explore that, although it can often provide good local color. (“About midday you come to the Inn of the Prancing Fairy. It lies at a crossroads with the road leading to Elegor in the north.”) Often you can just look at your map and get a pretty good idea of where they might go.

For example, if the PCs are travelling down the Delimbyr from Secomber to Daggerford and they come to a ruined tower that you determine is a crossroads with a route heading to the southeast, you could pretty easily conclude that there must be a small tributary river flowing out of the Misty Forest that joins the Delimbyr here.

As you’re describing the PCs’ journey, it may also be useful to describe the changing terrain they’re passing through. A terrain feature generator could use a simple mechanic like having a 1 in 6 chance each day of the terrain changing, and then tables to determine the new terrain features that they encounter (likely based on the base terrain type they’re traveling through). Terrain features could include vegetation, debris, obstacles, things seen on the horizon, etc.

RUNNING WITH ROUTES

As you begin running games with the route system, here are a few things to keep in mind.

First, the structure does not inherently make travel interesting. If you think of the structure as a way by which specific scenes (the landmarks and random encounters) can be easily framed, then it follows that you still need to make those scenes meaningful.

By default, the route system will lead you towards a generic travelogue (“…and then we went to X and then we went to Y and then we went to…”). But the best travelogues find ways to elevate the sequence of events. You want your game to resonate with the powerful journeys of The Lord of the Rings, rather than plodding along in the dull procedural of something like The Ringworld Engineers.

If you’re of a dramatist bent, think of what kind of story you want to be telling with this journey: Exploration, a race, escape, survival, self-discovery, edification. Or is the journey simply a convenient framing device for a number of individually interesting and complete short stories? Journeys can set mood (think of the emotional toll of Frodo and Sam’s long trek across Mordor), emphasize a theme (sure are a lot of goblins in these fens), establish current events (passing caravans of refugees from the war), or provide hooks to side quests.

Regardless, think about the agenda of the scenes you’re framing to. Why are you framing to these moments? What’s the bang that forces the PCs to make one or more meaningful choices in that scene? (These topics are discussed at more length in The Art of Pacing.)

If you can’t think of any agenda or bang for a particular landmark, then consider demoting that landmark to a part of the abstract description of the journey or even drop it entirely. (The truth is that the PCs will see a lot of stuff on the road. You’re going to skip over most of it. The important thing is to figure out what stuff you need to focus on in order for the journey to be meaningful.)

THE PROBLEM WITH MULTIPLE ROUTES: A fundamental problem with the route system is the choice between routes. This inherently creates a choose-your-own-adventure structure in which you’re prepping a lot of material for two different routes and then immediately throwing out at least half of that prep as soon as the PCs choose one route over another.

There are, however, a few ways that you can mitigate this problem.

First, you can often minimize wasted prep by having the players choose their route at the end of a session. You still need to broadly prep each route so that a meaningful choice can be made between routes, but this is fairly minimal and you only need to prep the chosen route in fully playable detail.

Second, in many cases there may not actually be a choice between multiple routes. We talked about this briefly before, but if the decision of route boils down to a calculation rather than true choice, then you only need to prep the route that’s calculated to be best.

Third, you can focus your prep on proactive elements that are relevant regardless of which route is chosen.

Being chased by the bad guys is an easy example of this: With the Ringwraiths chasing them from the Shire to Rivendell, the hobbits — and, later, Strider — make a number of route choices balancing speed, safety, and stealth. The threat of the Ringwraiths (and their other agents) make these choices interesting, but you only need to prep the Ringwraiths once.

You can also feature content that the PCs carry along the road with them. For example, you might prep a murder mystery and/or romantic drama that features the team of hirelings the PCs have brought along on the journey. For the “Battle of the Bands” scenario in the Welcome to the Island anthology for Over the Edge, Jeremy Tuohy and I developed an interlinked system of road talk and encounters on the road that create an evolving drama with the NPCs the characters collect along the way.

Fourth, you can find ways to reuse, reincorporate, and recycle material so that even if the PCs don’t see the stuff on Route B on this particular journey, you’ll still end up using it at some point in the future.

BACK TO HEXCRAWLS

Which actually brings us all the way back to hexcrawls.

Because it turns out that a lot of the stuff we’ve built into our route system — landmarks, navigation DCs, terrain, travel times, etc. — actually just fall out of a fully stocked hexcrawl with no additional prep whatsoever.

This is one of the many reasons that a truly ready-to-play hexcrawl would actually be one of the highest value supplements a game company could publish. The utility of the hexcrawl is incredibly high to any individual GM, particularly if you can eliminate the inefficient nature of most hexcrawl prep by spreading that value across an audience of hundreds or thousands.

(Unfortunately, most hexcrawl products aren’t fully stocked and ready-to-play. They just provide a very high level overview of the would-be content of the hexcrawl, leaving a lot of the actual work in the GM’s lap.)

To be clear here, I’m not saying that we should abandon the route system and go back to hexcrawling. The hexcrawl system is still optimized for exploration, not travel. What I’m saying is that if you map a route across a fully stocked hexcrawl, then 99% of the work in defining that route for us in the route system can just be directly yanked out of the hexcrawl content.

If you’re working from a hexcrawl, you can also begin experimenting with trailblazing structures in which the PCs create their own routes through the wilderness. In fact, whether you have a system for trailblazing or not in a hexcrawl campaign, you’ll probably find that the PCs just naturally create routes for themselves: They want to get back to the Citadel of Lost Wonders so that they can continue looting it, and they will figure out how to make that happen. These routes almost always take the form of landmark trails, and will often feature the PCs making their own navigational landmarks to fill in the gaps.

THE ROUTE MAP

Whether you’re working from a hexcrawl or not, if your campaign regularly features travel then you will, over time, begin to accumulate a collection of planned routes that crisscross the local region. Over time, it is likely that this route map will evolve into a pointcrawl: As the routes intersect and overlap with each other, the map will develop enough depth that the players can make complex navigational decisions and begin charting out their own routes in detail.

If this is a style of play that appeals to you, it may be tempting to imagine sitting down and planning this elaborate route map ahead of time as part of your campaign prep. There may be a few major, obvious routes where this makes sense, but for the most part I recommend resisting the temptation. Partly because the thought of all that wasted prep makes the little winged GM on my shoulder wince, but mostly because it’s intrinsically more effective to let the players (by way of their PCs) tell you where they want to go and what the important routes are.

In transportation planning there’s a concept called the desire path: These are the paths created by the erosion of human travel across grass or other ground covering. It’s the way that people want to travel, even if the planned or intended paths are telling them to take a different route.

It has become quite common for urban planners to open parks, college campuses, and similar spaces without sidewalks, wait to see where the desire paths naturally form, and only then install the pavement.

You’re doing the same thing here: Following the players’ paths of desire and developing the campaign along the lines that they have chosen.

FURTHER READING

If you’re interested in delving deeper into this sort of thing, I recommend checking out:

• Pathcrawls from Detect Magic
• Pointcrawls from Chris Kutalik
• Subhex Wilderness Generation from 9 and 30 Kingdoms