Go to Part 1

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

#0. HAVE A MAP

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

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

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

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

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

Third, grab some hexmapping software. Current options include:

• Worldographer
• Tiled Map Editor
• Hextml

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

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

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

Fourth, throw down some roads and rivers.

You’re done.

#1. BE CREATIVE, BE AWESOME, BE SINCERE

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

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

Put ‘em in hexes.

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

Get ‘em in hexes.

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

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

#2. JUMP AROUND

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

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

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

#3. STEAL

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

Steal.

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

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

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

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

Next, flip open your copy of Candlekeep Mysteries:

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

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

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

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

And more.

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

#4. STEAL MORE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How could we hook the lore of these locations together?

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

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

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

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

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

Go to Part 3: Further Inspiration

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SAMPLE HEX KEYS

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

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

Red Ruth has a heartstone.

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

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

Here’s another simple one:

K13 – RUINED TEMPLE OF ILLHAN

See hex detail.

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

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

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

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

B5 – BONE CRATER

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

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

N15 – RECENT FOREST FIRE

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

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

C2 – WYVERN SHAFT

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

Wyvern: Has a large scar on its left side from a spear wound; has preferred to stay away from intelligent prey ever since. (MM, p. 303)

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

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

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

F15 – SKULL ROCK (on river)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AREA 7: Slain wights.

AREA 8: Staked vampires.

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

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

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

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

Go to Part 2: Stocking Your Hexes