Go to Part 1

The basic, traditional design of a hexcrawl looks something like this:

(1)   Draw a hexmap. In general, the terrain of each hex is given as a visual reference and the hex is numbered (either directly or by a gridded cross-reference). Additional features like settlements, dungeons, rivers, roads, and polities are also typically shown on the map.

(2)   Key the hexmap. Using the numbered references, key each hex with an encounter or location. (It is not necessary to key all of the hexes on the map.)

(3)   Use (or design) mechanics which will let you determine how far the PCs can move while traveling overland. Determine the hex the PCs start in and track their movement.

(4)   Whenever the PCs enter a new hex, the GM tells them the terrain type of the hex and triggers the encounter or location keyed to that hex: The PCs experience the event, encounter the monsters, or see the location.

In the traditional structure, it’s also expected that the PCs will be mapping the hexes as they explore.

And that’s pretty much it.

ANALYZING THE CRAWL

As we look at this basic structure for the hexcrawl, we can begin to see some common features of the ‘crawl structure in general.

Default Goal: The default goal of a hexcrawl is exploration. This notably lacks a strong, specific motivator. In a dungeoncrawl, as we discussed, the default goal is to “find all the treasure”, “kill all the monsters”, or some other variant of “clear the dungeon”. Exploring and mapping the dungeon is usually a part of this experience, but the exploration is primarily a means to an end.

Thus, over the years, various goals have been grafted onto the hexcrawl structure to provide a strong motivation for the exploration. (For example, the hexcrawl campaign I’m currently designing takes place on the edge of civilization and there are bounties paid for those who first make interesting discoveries in the wilderness.) But I suspect one of the reasons hexcrawling faded away in the early days of the hobby is because, unlike dungeoncrawling, it lacked a clear, default goal to provide strong motivation and a reward structure.

Default Action: Just like a dungeoncrawl, the default action of a hexcrawl is “pick a direction and go”.

Easy to Prep: In terms of robust design, hexcrawls are very easy to prep. If it’s difficult for the GM of a dungeoncrawl to forget to include a door, it’s even more difficult for a GM to prep a hexcrawl in which the players can’t pick a direction to go. (If the GM isn’t keying every hex, there is a slight danger that they won’t include a sufficient density of content to make play interesting. This is a minimal risk, but consider something like X1 Isle of Dread: Presented as the introductory hexcrawl wilderness scenario for BECMI, the content of the module is actually too sparse to be effectively run as such.)

In terms of prep load, however, hexcrawls can be a little more difficult. Partly this is because there’s no natural “end point” for prepping a hexcrawl: Trying to key an entire world (or even just a full sheet of hexes) can look pretty daunting, and early game manuals weren’t very instructive in terms of explaining how prep load could be managed.

But hexcrawls can also represent a heavy prep load because any given hex can literally require just as much prep as an entire dungeon (if it, for example, has a dungeon in it).

Easy to Run: Once given a proper game structure, I find hexcrawls very easy to run. Even moreso than dungeoncrawls the content of the hexcrawl is naturally firewalled into discrete sections.

One thing that makes hexcrawls a little more difficult to run, however, is the transition between “levels” of material. In a dungeoncrawl, everything is handled at roughly the same level of abstraction: Whether you’re moving between keyed areas or interacting with the content in a keyed area, the actions are described in a consistent (and very specific) way. In a hexcrawl, however, the GM needs to find the effective transition point between “you spend most of the afternoon traveling over the rolling hills east of Maernath” and “you’re fighting orcs; where are you moving in the next ten seconds?”

This is not a massive difficulty, of course, but it does require the GM to develop an additional skill set. Thus it is easy to see the hexcrawl as a natural progression from the dungeoncrawl for the GM: A robust structure using many of the same skills, but also requiring the development of a few new tricks.

Structure, Not Straitjacket: As with the dungeoncrawl, players are given a default action (“pick a direction and go”), but within the hexcrawl scenario structure they’re still free to do pretty much anything their imaginations can concoct.

Flexibility Within the Form: Even moreso than the dungeoncrawl, a GM can put just about anything they want into a hexcrawl scenario structure. (It is, after all, a method for keying an entire world.)

SUMMARIZING THE ‘CRAWL

Looking at the dungeoncrawl and hexcrawl side-by-side, I think we can begin to draw some general conclusions about the ‘crawl structure in general:

(1)   It uses a map with keyed locations. (This provides a straight-forward prep structure.)

(2)   Characters transition between keyed locations through simple, geographic movement. (This provides a default action and makes it easy to prep robust scenarios.)

(3)   The structure includes an exploration-based default goal. (This motivates player engagement with the material and also synchronizes with the geographic-based navigation through the scenario structure.)

In practice, I’ve also found that these ‘crawl structures make it very easy for groups to engage, disengage, and re-engage with the scenario. (You can go into a dungeon, fight stuff for awhile, leave, and when you come back the dungeon will still be there.) This, it turns out, makes them ideal structures for casual play (because players can feel as if they’ve accomplished something even if the dungeon is only half-explored) and open tables (because the disengagement/re-engagement process allows completely different groups of players to interact with the same material).

After considerable thought, I’ve concluded that these latter properties come from:

(A)  Material within the scenario structure is firewalled. (In general, area 20 of a dungeon isn’t dependent on area 5.)

(B)   The default goal is holographic. (You can explore some of the wilderness or get some of the treasure and still feel like you’ve accomplished something. You can’t half-solve a mystery or execute half a heist and feel the same way.)

(C)   The default goal is non-specific. (You can get a bunch of treasure from Dungeon A; then get more treasure from Dungeon B and still be accomplishing your goal of Getting Lots of Treasure.)

(D)  The default goal isn’t interdependent. (You can clear the first half of a dungeon and somebody else can clear the second half. In general, you can’t solve the second half of a mystery unless you’ve got the clues from the first half.)

We’ll be coming back to see what we can do with these general principles of the ‘crawl structure, but first I want to turn back to the hexcrawl scenario structure and see what we can build on top of a basic structure.

Go to Part 7: Playing with Hexcrawls

Tagline: Possibly the best superhero setting ever created specifically for a roleplaying game. Inspired by works like Astro City, Marvels, and Kingdom Come this is a balanced, believable setting for the Champions game.

I knew I was picking up a high-quality product with San Angelo: City of Heroes when I turned to page five and saw the first proper illustration of the book (ignoring one which accompanies the table of contents): A boy looking up into the sky, his basketball laying forgotten on the ground next to him; behind him the shadow of a caped figure flying past. The first words of the book? “San Angelo is truly the City of Heroes.” Definitely.

STRENGTHS

Patrick Sweeney and the folks down at Gold Rush Games have really put together a gem. San Angelo, a fictional Californian city, takes the best elements of Astro City, Marvels, and Kingdom Come (projects all written by Kurt Busiek and Mark Waid who were, in turn, influenced by great comic book artisans of the past) and adds spice. In a little over 255 pages San Angelo: City of Heroes delivers the type of tantalizing hooks and richly textured background that is all too often lacking in your average sourcebook.

You will find that there is nothing lacking in this book. You get a finely detailed history of the city (dating back to its pre-colonial roots), a look at its current geography (in a neighborhood-by-neighborhood breakdown), an analysis of its major players (with holes deliberately left to be filled in and personalized by the GM), a look at its commercial development (from the biggest companies to the fast food joints your characters would probably find themselves hanging out at), and much more. You are left with the indelible impression that San Angelo is a living, breathing city. That’s worth the price of admission right there – far too many city supplements in the RPG industry fail to accomplish that, even when they’re based on real cities. For San Angelo to accomplish that, while being entirely fictional, is impressive feat.

Further, Sweeney has done an excellent job of making San Angelo a balanced, believable superhero world. He chooses not to include some of the more extreme staples of the superhero genre (such as aliens), but he does so in order to capture a feel of “pseudo-realism” which readers of Astro City will quickly recognize and everyone will appreciate.

In addition to the big stuff, the book also has all those nice little touches which turn a good product into a great product. The attention to detail is exquisite, but the most noticeable of these touches are the quotes from the citizens of San Angelo. These are both amusing and insightful and a prime example of the high quality his product offers.

Finally, although the book is designed with the Hero game system in mind, because the setting works so well as a setting it transcends its intended engine and could be successfully used in almost any superhero campaign. San Angelo is an inspirational product, and succeeds brilliantly because of that.

WEAKNESSES

Marring this relatively perfect picture are a few flaws. First, the lay-out is not always as keen as it might be (there’s one place where an inset causes a line of text to be reduced to less than six characters).

Second, the book lacks an index. The ultra-detailed Table of Contents typical of Hero products helps make up for that, but nothing is more annoying than trying to track down information without an index. Especially if time is of the essence (such as during the middle of a gaming session).

Finally, although the book is chock full of NPCs, not enough of those PCs are supers. It has been said that what makes one science fiction universe different from another is the aliens. That may or may not be true, but it is almost certainly true that what makes one superhero setting different from another are the superheroes themselves. The explanation for the lack of super NPCs is that the PCs are supposed to be the focus of the story. Well, yes, of course. But haven’t you ever heard of the word “crossover”? And who would want to adventure in the Marvel Universe if it wasn’t because they shared that universe with Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, Captain America, and a host of others? I consider this lack to be the most serious problem the book possesses, but it is certainly not a crippling one.

CONCLUSION

If you have even the slightest interest in superhero roleplaying, buy this book. If you’re looking to start a new campaign there’s a good chance this will save you a lot of problems. If you have an established campaign then San Angelo would make an excellent addition to your world with a few modifications. The strengths of the book vastly outweigh the handful of weaknesses and what looks to be a strong line of support products are already on GRG’s production schedule. You won’t be disappointed.

Style: 4
Substance: 5

Writers: Patrick Sweeney
Publisher: Gold Rush Games
Price: $25.00
Page Count: 255
ISBN: 1-890305-03-0

Originally Posted: 1999/03/17

Although I have never managed to run an actual game session in San Angelo, my fond memories of this book still mark it as one my favorite city supplements of all time. It managed to make the city feel unique, believable, and unmistakably alive while also managing to capture the ineffable excitement of a world filled with superheroes.

For an explanation of where these reviews came from and why you can no longer find them at RPGNet, click here.

Go to Part 1

The first really successful “post-crawl” scenario structure in the RPG industry is the mystery scenario. While it’s easy to find antecedents, it’s really with the publication of Call of Cthulhu in 1981 that the mystery scenario’s popularity exploded.

Thirty years later it can be a little difficult to appreciate how radical Call of Cthulhu was and just how fresh a breath of air it provided. It’s been said that the game “busted gaming out of the dungeon” (which is more literally true if we understand “dungeon” to mean crawl-based scenario structures in general), but its revolution has now become ubiquitous. If you look at published scenarios today, mystery-based scenarios are at least as popular as crawl-based scenarios (and even the crawl-based scenarios often include a large dose of mystery-based play). And outside of D&D the victory is even more complete: Virtually every published scenario is mystery-based.

The degree to which this marketplace dominance reflects actual practice at the gaming table can perhaps be quibbled with. But, either way, it’s actually rather curious once you start reflecting on it: Outside of gaming, mysteries are popular, but they aren’t all-consuming. (And even within gaming you don’t see mysteries consuming the board game or video game markets.)

There are probably several reasons for the popularity of mystery scenarios in RPGs. (For example, an unsolved mystery presents a challenge. Overcoming that challenge – by solving the mystery – provides the kind of clear-cut victory condition that can be achieved with only a few things outside of direct competition or combat.) But I suspect a large part of it is that mystery scenarios present straight-forward game structures that are (a) easy to explain to GMs and (b) intuitively grasped by players.

If we start to look at mystery scenarios using the same structural analysis we used for dungeoncrawls, it’s relatively easy to see this from the player’s point of view:

Default Goal? Solve the mystery.

Default Action? Look for clues.

At this point, however, we have to acknowledge that there’s something different about the mystery scenario structure. While it gives some guidance in answering the player’s question, “What do I do next?” it doesn’t provide a complete answer. Instead, once the players have found their clues, they’ll need to draw a conclusion from those clues. If they don’t draw the necessary conclusion, the mystery scenario will stop providing a default action for them to take.

In other words, mystery scenario structures are more fragile than dungeoncrawls. And this fragility becomes more evident as we shift to the GM’s side of the equation:

Easy to Prep? Unlike a dungeoncrawl, it’s very easy for a neophyte GM to screw up the design of a mystery scenario: If they don’t include a necessary clue, for example, or expect the players to make an intuitive leap they’re not capable of making, the scenario structure will break.

Easy to Run? At a macro-level, mystery scenarios are usually still chunked into smaller, more manageable packets (e.g., each location where clues can be found). But, unlike a basic ‘crawl, these chunks are not as firmly “firewalled”. This generally requires the GM to have a greater understanding of the scenario’s totality and makes a mystery scenario a little more difficult for neophytes to run.

At a micro-level, however, mystery scenarios are generally pretty easy to run if you’re using a skill-based system. (Which, perhaps not coincidentally, were becoming ubiquitous right around the same time mystery scenarios were sky-rocketing to dominance.) This is because skill-based systems can generally be broken down into (a) resolving the success or failure of a physical action or (b) the acquisition of information. Clues, of course, are a type of information, so skill-based systems provide a self-evident method of resolution.

By way of contrast, running a mystery-based scenario in a system like OD&D – which lacks a mechanical basis for determining clue acquisition – can be a lot more challenging. Of course, this difficulty can be overcome if you simply introduce such a mechanic. A simple one would be something like, “If the players say they’re looking around, they automatically find any clues in the area.”

The GUMSHOE system uses a similar mechanic. It says, “If the players say they’re using the right skill, they automatically find any matching clues in the area.” As a game structure, of course, this leaves something to be desired (encouraging, as it does, players to treat their skills like a laundry list in every scene).

But I digress.

FRAGILE SCENARIOS

The point here is that mystery scenarios are a relatively fragile scenario structure: More likely to leave the players stymied; more likely to leave new GMs confused; more difficult for new GMs to design.

What we will discover is that this is often true: Many of the RPG scenario structures we use are remarkably fragile. Like delicate sugar crystals, they are often smashed to smithereens during the course of actual play, forcing GMs to stitch them back together on-the-fly. The robust simplicity offered by the geography of a crawl-based scenario structure – “pick a direction and go” – is difficult to replicate.

Obviously, once you’re aware of the fragility in your game structures, you can start thinking about ways to make them more robust. The Three Clue Rule is a simple example of this: It provides a straight-forward methodology which specifically buttresses the fragile breaking point of a basic mystery scenario.

For now, however, our attention must turn back to the robust demesnes of the ‘crawl structure. For that, we’ll need to journey overland to the wild realms of the hexcrawl…

Go to Part 6: Hexcrawls

Viktor Fetsch

No words this time. Hopefully the cover will speak for itself.

Go to Part 1

Tied into the success of the dungeoncrawl is the success of traditional combat systems in roleplaying games. Although individual mechanics may vary, virtually all roleplaying games use a basic game structure for combat derived from D&D: Combat is divided into rounds in which everyone gets to take an action (or actions). Usually combat is further defined by an initiative system of some sort, so that you can easily answer the question, “Who goes next?”

If this sounds like the rigid structure of a boardgame or card game, that’s because it is: Derived from tabletop wargames, the average RPG combat system supplies clear-cut answers to the questions of, “What do I do?” and “How do I do it?”

Or, to break it down in a fashion similar to the dungeoncrawl:

Default Goal: Kill (or incapacitate) your opponents.

Default Action: Hit them.

Easy to Prep: Grab a bunch of monsters from the Monster Manual.

Easy to Run: The combat system breaks the action down into a specific sequence and usually provides a fairly comprehensive method of how each action should be resolved.

This is one of the reasons why so many roleplaying games focus so much mechanical attention on combat: No matter how much the players may be floundering, all you have to do is throw a couple of thugs at them and suddenly everyone at the table knows what to do. It’s a comfortable and easy position to default to.

It should also be fairly easy to see the almost perfect mesh between the macro-level structure of the dungeoncrawl and the micro-level structure of combat: When you pick an exit in the dungeoncrawl and find a room filled with monsters, you seamlessly switch into combat. When the combat has been resolved (and the room emptied of interest), you effortlessly return to the dungeoncrawl scenario structure and pick another exit.

Rinse, wash, repeat.

REWARDS

Combat also shows us how D&D links its systems of reward directly to its default game structures: The dungeoncrawl takes you to monsters, combat lets you defeat the monsters, and defeated monsters reward you with XP and treasure.

This is something which I believe other XP reward systems have generally overlooked: Many games have broken XP away from being a combat reward, but they haven’t reattached the XP award to another concrete game structure.

Whether or not that’s a desirable thing is a completely different discussion; a discussion involving Skinner boxes, the psychology of reward-driven pleasure, mechanical-reinforcement techniques, and a whole mess of other stuff.

But I think it’s an unexplored design space that would be interesting to turn some focus on. Particularly when you consider that (A)D&D has featured non-combat rewards for more than 20 years, and yet people still complain about all the XP in D&D coming from killing monsters.

Go to Part 5: Mysteries