Momentum in 2d20 is generated when you roll more successes on an action test than required by the difficulty of the check. These points of Momentum can be spent to either immediately improve the result of the current check or saved to be used in the future, allowing you to build Momentum over the course of several lesser actions until you can accomplish big things.

Momentum can be spent to do stuff like:

• Add +1d20 to future skill tests
• Create obstacles for opponents (generally increasing the difficulty of their skill tests)
• Improve the quality of success
• Increase the scope of success
• Reduce the time required to accomplish a task
• Perform a normally noisy action stealthily
• Take an extra action in an action scene
• Boost damage on an attack
• Get a called shot
• Trigger program effects in Infowar

And so forth.

In Infinity we also specifically emphasized that Momentum is best seen as a creative tool for empowering the players. The GM is also given several structures for making complex rulings around Momentum (see p. 407 of the core rulebook).

One of these is using Momentum to model preparation. If the PCs want to take one action to set up or create advantage on another, the GM can call for a test on the first action (even if it normally wouldn’t require an action test) and then any Momentum generated on that test represents the advantage gained on the primary task.

One of the limitations to this approach, however, is that Momentum ablates over time. At the end of each scene, the team’s pool of saved Momentum is decreased by one. This means that if you want to set up an advantage in one scene that will benefit you for the next scene, it’s difficult to do that.

This problem can be solved by adapting a cool mechanic from Trail of Cthulhu: dedicated pools.

DEDICATED MOMENTUM POOLS

A dedicated Momentum pool can only be used in a given circumstance or in relation to a given subject. For example, you might hack the security cameras in a megacorp’s headquarters, creating a pool of Momentum that can be spent on things like Stealth and Observation tests when the PCs go to infiltrate the HQ.

GMs might also rule that certain resources simply grant a pool of dedicated Momentum. (Perhaps the patron who hired the PCs to steal the megacorp’s new research into captured Tohaa technology simply hands them the access codes to the security cameras as part of their briefing packet. They get the same dedicated Momentum pool even though they didn’t make any skill tests to obtain it.)

There are two advantages to a dedicated Momentum pool.

First, the dedicated Momentum pool does not ablate. The dedicated Momentum pool is separate from other saved Momentum and does not decrease at the end of each scene. This makes a dedicated Momentum pool a great model for preparations that play out over multiple scenes or which are made long before their intended use: The PCs lose some of the utility of the Momentum (since it has to be used for a specific purpose), but in exchange the Momentum becomes more durable.

Second, the dedicated Momentum pool can also create unique vectors that allow the PCs to take actions that they otherwise couldn’t. If you have access to the security feeds, for example, you can check them for activity in other areas of the building. If you have a copy of the religious text of an extremist Morat cult, you can reference it for information about their rituals that you would otherwise have no way of knowing.

These vectors can cut both ways, though! When the Momentum from the security camera pool runs out for example, it could easily justify the GM spending Heat to generate a complication in the form of the megacorp’s hackers realizing their system has been compromised and launching an Infowar attack on the PCs.

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.

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