A much more literal “layer” you can use in conjunction with a hexcrawl is a pointcrawl. You can actually imagine a hexmap and a pointmap both being used to depict the exact same swath of the game world.

But since hexcrawls and pointcrawls are both designed to handle geographic movement through an environment, why would you want to do this? Wouldn’t it just be redundant?

Not exactly, because hexcrawls and pointcrawls both look at the environment in different ways and specialize in handling different types of movement. A hexcrawl allows freeform movement in any direction, while a pointcrawl organizes the world into specific paths between points.

You can perhaps appreciate the distinction most clearly by looking at roads & trails.

While it’s certainly possible to resolve travel along a road using the procedures of a hexcrawl, in practice I’ve found that it can be quite awkward. In a typical hexcrawl procedure, there’s all kinds of decision points and resolution points that become redundant or overly complicated when the PCs are following a road. (For example, the PCs can’t really become lost.) Tracking progress through a hex while traveling by road is more fiddly than it needs to be, and also calls attention to the fact that the rigid specificity of the road is at conflict with the abstract nature of the hex. Even referencing hex keys along the road is more complicated than it needs to be.

Meanwhile, the types of decisions the players (and their characters) are going to naturally start wanting to make while traveling along a road are quite different from the decisions they’ll want to make while exploring freely through the wilderness. This creates a mismatch between the actions they’re declaring and the choices you need them to make in order to resolve the hexcrawl procedure.

In short, you’ll find yourself frequently fighting the procedure rather than using it.

THE ROAD MAP

So as you’re prepping your hexcrawl, you may want to take the time to prep a pointcrawl of the region, with a pointmap detailing all the major roads and trails. In my experience, you’ll also want to include the major rivers, since it’s quite common for PCs to use these as navigational paths.

These roads, rivers, and trails will likely also appear on your hexmap, of course, and give you the freedom to resolve travel along using either the procedures of the hexcrawl or pointcrawl, whichever one seems most appropriate and useful at any given moment.

In fact, I would do everything possible to keep these two layers in sync with each other.

If you’re starting from a hexmap, refer to the hex key as you set up the pointcrawl and:

1. Make sure to include every On Road / On River encounter located along the path.
2. Check for Visible landmarks that aren’t technically on the path, but would be seen while traveling along it. It’s quite likely that these should be included as points on your pointmap.

You probably don’t need to think about the mountains visible to the north while traveling along the Old Keep Road, but “midway between Northpoint and the crossroads you can see the ruins of an old lighthouse on an island off the coast” is a milestone you’ll want to mention.

Conversely, if/when you end up adding new points to your pointmap, you’ll usually want to make sure they also get added as On Road locations in your hex key.

BESPOKE PATHS

On that note, during actual play in your hexcrawl, your players will very quickly begin forging bespoke paths through the wilderness.

Sometimes this will be a deliberate action, which is what the trailblazing rules are for: The PCs are specifically marking paths with trail signs so that they can follow them later.

But it’s even more common for de facto paths to emerge during play: To get to the Violet Halls, we head east from Maernath until we hit the river, then follow the river southeast into the Gloomboughs until we reach the island with the standing stone. From there we turn due south towards the mountains until we reach the broken stone gate.

If you learn to recognize these bespoke paths as they emerge and add them to your pointmap, you’ll make life much easier for yourself. By resolving the journey as a prepared path, you’ll be able to much more efficiently and effectively resolve these trips through known territory, and spend more time pushing ever deeper into the Violet Halls.

(And, of course, if the PCs ever get lost along the way, you can be bounce back into the hexcrawl procedure and begin figuring out where they end up.)

In some cases, you may also discover that these bespoke paths fade away again (e.g., when the PCs have finished exploring the Violet Halls, the path they followed to get there stops being relevant). If so, and if you find your pointmap getting a little too crowded, there’s nothing wrong with pruning these paths away so that you can focus on what’s relevant.

(I do recommend archiving pruned paths somewhere that you can find them again, though. You never know when the PCs might suddenly decide to return to the Violet Halls.)

OTHER POINTCRAWL LAYERS

Pointcrawls are an incredibly versatile scenario structure, so it probably won’t surprise you to discover that there are more ways to use them in conjunction with a hexcrawl than simply an alternative navigation layer.

For example, consider an underdark tunnel system that links various dungeons keyed to your hexmap, but which can also be used to reach deeper and even more dangerous locations.

Pointcrawls can also be very useful for subhex navigation, which will be the topic of another addendum.

Back to Hexcrawls

A hexcrawl is one way of looking at a game world.

Like other scenario and campaign structures, a hexcrawl can be broadly understood as a method for organizing prepped material paired to a complementary procedure of play: A dungeon procedure provides structure for PCs moving between rooms and exploring their contents, and it’s logically paired to a prep structure in which rooms are positioned on a map (to make them easy to reference) and keyed with the information needed to explore them.

A hexcrawl, similarly, creates a map of the world broken down into hexes because those hexes provide a convenient structure for keying content and managing overland exploration.

But one must not mistake the map for the territory.

One way to think about this is to consider the howling wilderness of the typical hex: We generally key no more than a single point of interest in each hex. But whether we’re talking about a 5-mile hex, a 6-mile hex, or the Alexandrian 12-mile hex, if there was really only one point of interest in a hex, it would mean a vast and desolate place.

Lay a hex grid to scale over a map of your local county, shire, or district and you’ll see what I mean. For example, consider Brown County in Minnesota, which I picked by basically clicking randomly on a map. It would consist of roughly eight 12-mile hexes, but it contains seven cities, a couple dozen townships, fifteen major lakes, three major parks and wildlife preserves, multiple scientific outposts, and forty different sites on the National Register of Historic Places. Whichever eight of those you pick, you’re obviously going to be leaving a lot of stuff out of your hex key.

That’s how the real world works. It’s also how your game world works: Whether consciously or otherwise, you’re choosing to key the most important or significant thing in each hex, while overlooking the others. This isn’t a problem, of course, unless you forget the conceit and begin to believe that what you’ve keyed is everything the game world has to offer.

(This is also why the Alexandrian Hexcrawl uses random encounters to procedurally generate new locations — e.g., lairs — on the hexmap. The more time the players spend in a particular region, the more of these “overlooked” details they’ll have a chance to discover precisely in the area of the game world they’re spending the most time in.)

The hexcrawl also has a procedural bias: The material is structured and keyed for the PCs to discover it through geographical exploration (e.g., “We walk north until we see something interesting.”). But this is not, of course, the only way that PCs can explore or interact with an area. It’s also pretty easy to imagine interesting elements of the game world that are largely or entirely inaccessible to simple geographic movement.

What I’ve found useful is to think of different structures as being “layers” of the game world. A hexmap, for example, is one “layer” — one method of keying and describing the game world — and it’s often more than enough to run an entire campaign. But it’s not a complete picture of the game world, and you can add more layers, each describing the world in a different way and each conducive to different types of PC actions.

Furthermore, since these layers are all describing the same world, they will also overlap or intersect with each other in different ways. While the PCs are exploring and interacting with the world in one way, you’ll be able to use the appropriate layer to run the game for them. Then, when they discover something new and/or set a new goal that will lead them to begin exploring the world in a new way, you’ll be able to shift to a new layer — a different scenario or campaign structure — to adjudicate what happens next.

And you can also, as the GM, design your world with these phase shifts in mind!

NODE-BASED LAYER

For example, consider node-based scenario design, in which nodes are linked to each other by clues.

Each node is a person, organization, event, activity, or, crucially, location. This means that each location keyed to your hexmap can also be thought of as a node and linked to other locations on your hexmap (i.e., other nodes) via clues.

For example, the hobgoblin bandits lairing in the ruins of the Black Baron’s Keep may have been sent by the Necromancer to spy on the elves of Silverwood. When keying the Black Baron’s Keep, therefore, it would be perfectly natural to include clues pointing to both the elven village in Silverwood and the Necromancer’s Tower.

If you want to start experimenting with this technique in your own hexcrawls, I recommend getting started with some simple loops:

The Black Baron’s Keep has clues pointing to the Necromancer’s Tower, the Elven Village, and the Hobgoblin Village.

Meanwhile, the Necromancer’s Tower has clues pointing to the Black Baron’s Keep, the Elven Village, and the Hobgoblin Village.

And so forth.

The advantage of this design is that it creates compact little scenarios that can be naturally explored no matter which of the nodes the PCs encounter first: Whether they’re attracted by the strange lights in the Black Baron’s Keep, hear reports of hobgoblin raids from the elves of Silverwood, or stumble across the hobgoblin village, they’ll be able to follow the clues and discover the other nodes.

To add additional complexity to these simple setups, consider linking a single node to multiple loops. For example, spying on the Silverwood may be only one of the Necromancer’s current schemes, with her tower acting as a sort of crossroads between different node-based scenarios.

As you become more comfortable with adding node-based layers to your hexcrawl, you’ll likely end up gravitating towards freeform design in the cloud, with your various hex-keyed locations pointing to each other freely in whatever manner makes the most sense. In doing so, you may also discover that you can use these same techniques without necessarily creating fully robust node-based scenarios.

What I mean is that, with the hexcrawl structure as a backstop, you don’t need to strictly obey the Three Clue Rule or Inverted Three Clue Rule. Or, to put it more simply: You can include a single clue from Hex A to Hex B, and it’s just fine if the PCs don’t find it, because the hexcrawl structure means they can just geographically navigate their way to Hex B with or without the clue.

Note that you can also plant clues into other structures of your hexcrawl campaign:

• Rumor tables, for example, are basically just big lists of free-ranging clues.
• Random encounters can also include clues pointing to hex locations. (This can even be true of procedurally generated clues. Tracks, for example, are inherently clues that point you to the locations that creatures are coming from or going to.)
• Even random treasure can be used to plant clues. (Random treasure maps are a classic example of this.)

All of these links add depth to your campaign. They actually feed back into the hexcrawl structure itself, giving the PCs’ the information they need to set goals that will guide their exploration, allowing them to travel with purpose instead of just wandering around the map aimlessly.

However, we’re still only scratching the surface here, because so far we’ve only been linking locations that also appear in our hex key (and are, therefore, also accessible via the hexcrawl). There’s no reason that we need to limit ourselves like this: Locations discovered through the hexcrawl can link us to nodes — people, events, organizations, activities, and even other locations — that DON’T appear in the hex key and could never be discovered by simply moving around the hex map. They literally exist on a completely separate “layer” of your campaign world.

I frequently find this approach useful for cities located in my hexcrawls. Like Maernath, for example:

Maernath might be the PCs’ homebase for the hexcrawl, or it might be a city they discover while exploring the region. Either way, it’s easy to see how the city itself could be encountered through the hexcrawl structure.

But simply seeing a city on the horizon isn’t going to reveal all of its secrets to you. For example, what if a scion of one of the noble families is collaborating with the Necromancer? They might be just one node in a much larger conspiracy scenario that’s infesting the city, but the PCs are unlikely to stumble onto this conspiracy just because they walked through the city gates.

(What I also like about this is that it connects the urban environment to the surrounding wilderness, and you can obviously do the reverse, too. It weaves your campaign together, not only adding depth, but also making everything feel interconnected.)

Another fun technique is to stock your hexcrawl with rituals, allowing the PCs to piece together the clues and supplies they need to figure out what, where, and possibly when they need to perform the ritual. These rituals, in turn, might unlock unique spells and abilities; empower magic items; summon mystic allies; or even open portals to extradimensional adventuring sites.

The region described by your hexcrawl might also include traveling elements, like a touring carnival, merchant caravan, or mystic phoenix. These are, obviously, not keyed to specific locations. You might include such elements on your random encounter table as one way of integrating them into the hexcrawl structure, but node-based design can provide another path for the PCs to discover them and track them down.

Note: You can also use node-based scenario design to provide links to location nodes far away from the region covered by the hexcrawl (e.g., you’ll need to take a ship south to pursue the political backing of the local privateers; or you’ll need to go to the Imperial City to follow the Cult of the Black Eye). This isn’t quite same thing as thinking of the campaign in terms of “layers,” but it IS an example of how you can use shifts in structure to present or handle different types of scenarios. Your structure should never feel like a straitjacket; it should be a tool that liberates you.

Go to Part 2: Pointcrawl Layers

Back to Hexcrawls

When a GM makes the transition from dungeons or scene-based play to wilderness travel, it’s not unusual for them to suddenly start struggling with describing that travel. The two most common afflictions are long-and-boring (with too much detail that’s poorly presented and neither interesting nor important) or short-and-boring (often bland, generic descriptions that fail to bring the journey to life).

What we want is to capture the epic grandeur of Tolkien’s Middle Earth; to bring our waterways to vivid life like Twain’s Mississippi; to make every corner of the world bristle with adventure like the Mediterranean Sea in Homer’s Odyssey.

But achieving these lofty aspirations can prove elusive for a couple of reasons.

First, whether we’re using hexcrawls, routes, or some other method to run our travel, these are all new procedures with new tools to learn. These can be studied, of course, but mastering them will require practice and experience, so it’s only to be expected that we’ll struggle a bit putting these into practice for the first time. “Whoops, I forgot to roll for a random encounter” and “Wait, what speed did you want to travel at?” aren’t exactly conducive to smooth, immersive descriptions.

Meanwhile, the very nature of time itself has changed.

In a dungeon, for example, pretty much everything is resolved in now time. As defined in the Art of Pacing, this is when the GM is basically describing events “as they happen” and the players are making every decision for their characters.

Wilderness travel, on the other hand, usually happens in abstract time, taking the form of eliding narration: “You wind you way through the canyons of the Opal Mesas for three days before turning south…” or “The afternoon passes quickly as you sail downstream, and as dusk approaches you can see thunderstorms on the horizon…”

At first glance, this seems quite simple. In practice, however, it unleashes a slew of new things we never had to consider before, particularly if we’re expecting the PCs to make meaningful navigational decisions along the way: How much time should be covered by our description? What events and activities can we / should we skip past entirely? What should be included in the description? When/how should the players be making decisions?

For example, how detailed should our description of the Opal Mesas be? And should it be the players’ decision to turn south after traveling three days through the Opal Mesas? Probably… unless they actually make that decision before you started the travel narration (e.g., “Okay, according to our maps we’re going to travel through the mesas and then turn south”). And, either way, what about deciding exactly which canyons to follow through the mesas? Should we be having the PCs make those decisions? Or maybe we should ask once per hex which direction they want to go?

These questions don’t necessarily have obvious answers. Worse yet, the answers will frequently CHANGE from one journey to the next. In fact, even the next time the PCs travel through the Opal Mesas you might have a completely different set of answers based on the circumstances of the trip.

Ultimately, describing travel — and doing so effectively — is more an art than a science. There is no one true way to describe the sun-kissed hills at dusk, the refreshing cool breezes that wash across your face as you head down into the Verdant Vale, or the thick cobwebs draped across the upper boughs of the Bleak Wood.

But there is a mental model that I use — a framework that helps me make sure I’m communicating clearly.

IDENTIFY THE VECTOR

First you need to identify WHAT you’re actually describing.

“Well, obviously I’m describing the journey.”

Sure. But probably not the whole thing all at once, particularly if the PCs are going to be making navigational choices along the way.

So what part of the journey are you describing right now?

I think of this as the group’s vector, but you might also think of it as a “segment” (of the journey) or a “container” (that you’re going to be filling up with your description). In short, look at where the PCs currently are and their intended/actual direction of travel. Looking along that line, you want to figure out where the next interruption will take place. That will give you the endpoint of the group’s current vector, and then you’ll know exactly what chunk of travel you need to describe.

Another way of thinking about the interruption is that it’s the next point along the vector where the players either will or might want to make a meaningful choice. Interruptions can be many different things:

• Terrain. A change in terrain — e.g., arriving at the forest; entering the Mire of Despair; emerging from the Opal Mesas — provides new navigational information to the players, which makes it likely, particularly if this is their first time exploring this region, that they’ll want to stop, try to figure out where they are, and possibly choose to head in a new direction.
• Landmark. Similarly, spotting a landmark is often a point where the PCs will need to make a choice — e.g., You see a castle off to the west. (Do they want to go check it out?)
• Destination. If the PCs are heading to a specific location, then obviously their journey will end when they reach it.
• Getting Lost. Or, more accurately, the point where the PCs realize that they’re lost. They’ll obviously want to stop, try to get their bearings, and then make a new navigational choice.
• Random Encounter. In most cases, when a random encounter is generated, you’ll want to give the players a chance to react to and/or interact with whatever the encounter is.
• End of Watch. Since the PCs need to choose which watch actions they’re going to perform during each watch, you’ll naturally want to stop at the end of each watch so that they can declare those actions… except this is a trap. The choice of a new watch action is often not meaningful at all, because it’s overwhelmingly likely that, for example, the navigator will continue being the navigator. This is why you want to instead establish standing orders for the expedition: It extends the vector so that you can’t get stuck in a long-and-boring cycle of minutia.
• End of Day. Another natural and regular endpoint is the end of the day. Although there are situations in which a vector will end up being longer than a single day, it’s a good default to aim for when in doubt or just getting started. A full day of travel will give you a nice chunk of resolution; settling in around the campfire each night is a logical place for the PCs to compare notes, do some bookkeeping, and prep for the new day; and if something like a random encounter interrupts the day, it’s easy to spot that and then set up another vector aiming for sunset.

Some of these interruptions, like a random encounter, will basically demand the vector’s end. Others can be more situational, and you’ll need to get in sync with your group: Are they in nitty-gritty exploration in an area with lots of new landmarks and terrain? Then you might have a lot of very short vectors. On the other hand, are they traveling a well-known route? Then you probably don’t have to stop when they leave the Emerald Wood — both you and them know where they’re going!

VECTOR PROCEDURE

So, to be clear, what you’re doing is:

1. Identifying the group’s intentions (i.e., their travel plans).
2. Resolving your hexcrawl procedure…
3. … until you reach an interruption.

And that’s the vector you’re going to describe.

The travel plan might simply be the intended direction of travel and travel pace, in which case the vector is quite literal (it’s a line pointing in that direction). However, in some cases, particularly if they’re traveling a familiar route, the players will declare a more complicated intention — e.g., “We’ll travel through the Emerald Wood, then turn southwest when we hit the Ochre Grasslands on the other side.” Assuming nothing else interrupts their intention, you can continue resolving your hexcrawl procedure through that predetermined navigational choice until you reach a meaningful interruption and identify the true end of the current segment.

In practice, I often look ahead and figure out what the end of the vector will be if everything goes “right” for the PCs. This lets me identify a “chunk” of travel that’s going to be fed through the hexcrawl procedure, which — with a little bit of mastery and experience — lets me batch up some tasks (i.e., making multiple random encounter checks in a single roll) resolve things more quickly and efficiently.

Resolving the chunk, of course, may reveal an additional interruption (e.g., the random encounter(s) I rolled), in which case the vector will end sooner. Which is, of course, just fine. Jot down a note of any pending resolutions (i.e., future random encounters), which also conveniently give you a head start when the next vector kicks off.

DESCRIBING THE VECTOR

With your vector in hand (which, in practice, will be a much quicker process than the detailed discussion above might lead you to believe), it’s now time to describe that vector to your players.

The foundation of your description is Terrain + Distance + Time.

Distance and time are easy: You know where the vector started and you know where it ends. Your travel rules will tell you how long it took to get from one point to the other.

For complex vector, you may also want to make a note — mental or otherwise — of the timing for milestones along the way (e.g., they reach the Emerald Forest after three hours and they arrive at the Atharan River after seven). These will help you sequence and provide a light structure for your description.

Terrain is, of course, sourced from your hexmap. Hexcrawl Tools: Spotting Distances provides a detailed breakdown for this, but here are the key points I’m usually thinking about:

• The PCs can see the terrain in their current hex.
• In relatively open terrains (e.g., plains) you might mention the terrain of neighboring hexes on the horizon. (This will be particularly true if the PCs are biased in the hex.)
• Heights can often let the PCs see a lot farther, although it’s usually unreliable. (Being high in the mountains, for example, can let you see a long way… or it can completely block your line of sight.) There are rules for seeking a vantage point that cover this, but as a rule of thumb you might once per day describe terrain and landmarks in hexes made visible by the heights.

In practice, this foundation covers most of what you need to describe:

Crossing through the tall, amber-colored grasses of the plains you reach the Emerald Forest in about three hours. You travel through the forest for the rest of the day and, near nightfall, you hear the roaring rapids of the Atharan River ahead.

But there are two other elements you’ll want to use to flesh out your descriptions: Landmarks and Unkeyed Details.

Landmarks are locations visible to anyone passing through a hex. Some landmarks, including mountains, will be visible from multiple hexes away (and you should make sure these are indicated on your hexmap for easy reference).

Some landmarks may function as interruptions that end the vector, but others will just be additional milestones for the journey.

Tip: An advanced technique here is to mention a landmark (e.g., “Around mid-afternoon you spot the ruins of an old castle on top of a tall hill a couple miles off to your left”) and then pause for just a beat. Not so long as to become expectant, but just a subtle break that gives players the space to say, “Let’s go check it out!” before you continue describing their journey forward.

Figuring out which landmarks should be interruptions, which ones you should give space for a reaction, and which are best just describe in passing (probably because the PCs have already come this way before and are expecting to pass the castle ruins) is something you’ll get a feel for.

When in doubt, it rarely hurts to just ask, “Do you want to check out the castle or keep heading east?” But, in my opinion, you don’t want your players to think that you’re pushing the castle on them. It’s more fun when they feel in control of their exploration.

Unkeyed Details are all the things in your game world that don’t appear in your prep notes: You don’t key the trees. Or the streams. Or every minor details of the terrain.

The key thing to understand here is that if we interpreted a hex in our hexcrawl as if it only contained the keyed point of interest, then it would be a vast howling emptiness. Think about everything interesting within six miles of where you’re reading this. Imagine a GM picking out the single most interesting thing in that area and adding it to their key. Now imagine that same GM describing a group of PCs traveling through the area. See how much stuff they’d miss if they only described what was in their key?

In short, your hexmap doesn’t include every road or river. Hexcrawls are often located out on unexplored frontiers, but if you have a hex keyed as farmland, the unkeyed scenery could even include passing by two or three small villages per hex. (This would obviously vary by locale, but in both medieval France and Qing Dynasty China, the villages were three to four miles apart.)

So what you want to do is add a light spicing of this unkeyed scenery into your descriptions: Describe them splashing through a small stream. Or following an old game trail that leads them down into the river valley.

It might be useful to think of these details as breathing life into a generic terrain symbol. It’s certainly these little details that will make your game world feel like a real and living place to your players.

Note that you don’t need to remember all these details: They’re unimportant by their very nature. Next time you might instead describe a glade dappled by sunlight that the PCs pass through on their way to the Atharan River instead of a game trail, and that’s just fine. You don’t need to memorize these fleeting moments any more than you need to memorize every stitch in your favorite quilt.

(The exception is when an unkeyed detail becomes important because the PCs choose to focus their attention on it. When that happens, just add it to your key. For example, they might say something like, “Let’s find that old game trail we followed last time!” Or they might decide to stop in one of the nondescript villages they’ve been passing along the road and rent a room at the local inn… where one of the PCs ends up falling in love with the innkeeper’s handsome son. They eventually end up getting married, the PC inherits the inn, and then their husband is tragically killed in an orc attack. Yeah… You should probably add that to your notes.)

Unkeyed details can also include minor travel activities: Stopping for a meal. Checking the map. The ranger finding that game trail. These are great because they protagonize the PCs and makes them a concrete part of the journey. You can take cues from the groups’ watch actions and make sure to spread the spotlight around. (Not every PC needs to be described as doing something in every vector, but over the course of several vectors everybody should get a turn.)

So, to sum this all up: Set your foundation with terrain + distance + time. Identify the landmarks the PCs will pass along the way and place them in sequence. Then lightly spice with evocative details to taste.

As you cross through the tall, amber-colored grasses of the plains, the Monterrat Peaks to the north parallel your journey. After about three hours, you reach the Emerald Forest. For the rest of the day, the cool shade of the boughs is a blessed relief from the sun’s heat. Near nightfall, as you head down in to the river valley, the pleasant birdsong of the forest is replaced by the roaring rapids of the Atharan River.

FRAME THE ENDPOINT

There’s a reason why the vector came to an end: A navigational choice. A random encounter. A location.

That interruption is a scene!

The players need to make a choice, so use the principles from the Art of Pacing to frame up the scene where they make that choice. In some cases, that scene will be quite short:

GM: You’ve reached the Atharan River.

Navigator: Okay. We’ll turn left and follow the river south until we see the Eld King’s statue.

At which point you’ll be able to rapidly pivot into identifying the next travel vector and describing it.

In other cases, you’ll instead be transitioning to a lengthier scene or even a full adventure before the PCs continue their journey. Either way, the important thing, as you bring your description to a close, is to clearly frame up the scene: Why are you stopping? What choice are you expecting the PCs to make? Make the stakes as clear as you can and make your bang as powerful as possible.

When in doubt, though, this can boil down to a simple question: You’ve reached [WHERE YOU ARE]… now what?

GM: You’ve reached the Atharan River… Where do you want to go now?

Navigator: We’ll turn left and follow the river south.

And away you go!

Back to Hexcrawls

Back in 2012, I was chatting with a guy online who claimed that, by the year 2017, computer games would exist which would allow GMs to create off-the-cuff in real-time just like they can currently improvise at the gaming table.

And I said, “Bullshit,” for what is probably obvious reasons to most of you, but nevertheless baffle people who seem to think that the special effects in MCU movies are created by someone saying, “Show Captain America punching Thanos with Thor’s hammer” and then thirty seconds later having a fully rendered shot pop out of the computer.

(Short version: That’s not how that works. And the difficulty of generating a fully interactive version of the scene properly rigged and optimized for a computer game engine would be at least an order of magnitude higher, probably more.)

In the process of calling bullshit, however, I ended up creating an example of off-the-cuff design in a tabletop RPG that would be virtually impossible to replicate in a computer game engine even with procedural content generators vastly superior to anything we have available to us today. (And even moreso in 2012 or 2017.)

It was nothing particularly spectacular, but there were a few touches of the fantastical that I think are rather evocative and worth sharing, and so I did that here on the Alexandrian back in 2014.

But here’s the thing: We’re definitely closer to that future now than we were in 2012 or 2014.

(I mean, that’s tautological. But you know what I mean.)

So I thought it might be fun to take the descriptions from the Valley of the Sapphire Waves and see what images are conjured forth by Midjourney.

My methodology here is relatively simple: I input a prompt using more or less the words from the original write-up of the Valley. Midjourney will then generate four images, and I’ll select whichever one I think is best. (“Best,” of course, is subjective, but it will be some combination of accurate, evocative, beautiful, and useful. Basically, it will be the image I would select if I was looking for a visual handout to use while GMing.)

I don’t know what the results will be. (I suspect “surprisingly good, but not great,” but we’ll see.) And, of course, no matter how immaculate the result is, we’ll still be miles away from running a game for my friends in a computer game engine and getting the computer to pop out this entire valley (or even just these specific locations) in a seamlessly playable form in the less than five minutes it took me to originally improvise for table use.

VALLEY OF THE SAPPHIRE WAVES

The Valley of the Sapphire Waves is filled with rolling fields of vibrant blue grass. Anyone standing in the waters of the valley will perceive the sun as eclipsed because Helios mourns the loss of his first wife (the Ur-Goddess of the Rivers, see hex 1).

HEX 1

The Falls of the Ur-Goddess. The 300 foot tall waterfall at the end of the valley flows up because it is the place where the Ur-Goddess of the Rivers was slain millennia ago.

HEX 2

Obelisk of Moonstone. Raised as a holy site by the Heresy Cult of the Ur-Goddess. The moonstone will heal anyone touching it at night, but under the rays of the sun it is cursed. (Anyone touching it suffers as per a bestow curse spell.)

HEX 3

The Stirge Mires. 1 in 3 chance of encounteing 1-6 stirges.

HEX 4

Goblin Moonstone Scavengers. Small tribe of goblins scavenging the moonstones scattered in rocky crevasses here.

HEX 5

Vale of the Dryad. This forestland is protected by a dryad whose spirit is bound to a treant. All the squirrels here can talk, many spontaneously forming acting troupes performing A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

HEX 6

Graveyard of the Moonstone Cults. 1 in 3 chance per turn of encountering 1-3 wights.

HEX 7

Medusa’s Vale. A medusa makes her home in the Sinkhole of Statuary.

HEX 8

Sphinx Guardians. Once a great tribe of sphinxes guarded the entrance to the valley (they were placed there by Helios), but their numbers are depleted. 1 in 3 chance of encountering a sphinx, which 75% of the time will be an undead skeleton. Remaining sphinxes will ask sun-oriented riddles before attacking.

POST MORTEM

I’m not entirely certain Midjourney knows what a sphinx is. (Or, at the very least, “sphinx skeleton” leaves it in a tizzy.)

The most accurate image is probably of the squirrels performing A Midsummer Night’s Dream. (The Falls of the Ur-Goddess aren’t bad, but they’re definitely not flowing upwards.)

I like Helios rising to eclipse the sun, but for me the most compelling image is probably of the Medusa’s sinkhole. Ironically, this is also (with the possible exception of the undead sphinxes) the most inaccurate of the images. But I am deeply intrigued by the creatures crawling around her.

From a practical standpoint, the whole process of generating images took me forty-five minutes to complete. So we’ve obviously still got a long way to go here.

It’ll be interesting to see what things look like if we check back in on this in another decade. (Or three.)

When running a hexcrawl, the easiest option is to use a single random encounter table that applies to the entire hexcrawl. No matter the hex or circumstance, if an encounter is indicated you simply roll on your one-and-only encounter table and you’re good to go.

But it can also be well worth your efforts to prep and use specialized encounter tables. For example, you might have different encounter tables based on:

• Terrain type (forest encounters vs. mountain encounters)
• Type of travel (road encounters vs. river encounters vs. wilderness encounters)
• Time of day (night encounters vs. day encounters)
• Regional encounters (using different tables for the Old Forest vs. the Azure Fields)

These categories can also overlap with each other (or not overlap with each other) depending on how your classify your world. For example, you might have a Road Encounters table that is used in both the Old Forest and the Azure Fields, as long as the PCs are on a road. On the other hand, you might also have both an Old Forest Encounters table and an Old Forest Road Encounters table, distinct from the Azure Fields Encounters table (or tables).

WHY SPECIALIZED TABLES?

Specialized tables, as noted, increase the amount of work required to prep them and the complexity of using the tables at your table. So why bother?

Primarily, using multiple tables allow you to be more precise in describing your world.

• Wyverns only live in the mountains, so logically they should only be encountered there.
• A river-specific table would allow you to key boat-related encounters that would obviously be inappropriate on the King’s Highway.
• The shadow hounds only come out at night.
• Goblins infest the Old Forest, but fear to challenge the blue rocs of the Azure Fields.

And so forth.

This kind of detail and, crucially, distinction isn’t just about taking your worldbuilding to the next level. (Although it is.) It also creates a dynamic environment in which the players can make meaningful choices: Do you risk encountering shadow hounds by traveling at night? The risks of the Old Forest are different from the Azure Fields, where are you going to explore? And so forth.

Playtest Tip: The corollary here is that the PCs should be able to learn the details of your encounter tables. Not only can you use your encounter tables to seed your rumor tables (e.g., “Old Pete tells you that the shadow hounds only come out at night”), you can also tap them for background events or topics of conversation when NPCs are making chit-chat.

ADVANCED RULE: VARY ENCOUNTER CHANCE

You can vary the chance of having an encounter in the same way that you can vary the encounter tables you’re rolling on. If you choose to do this, I recommend simply writing the encounter chance at the top of each encounter table for easy reference.

Design Tip: One potential drawback of varying encounter chance is that it becomes difficult to pre-roll encounters, since you can’t always be sure exactly where the PCs will be for the next encounter check(s). On the other hand, it’s a very effective way of making some regions of your campaign world more dangerous than others.

ALTERNATIVE: CHECK ALL APPLICABLE TABLES

If you care about multiple encounter factors — e.g., both region and travel type — an alternative to prepping every possible combination of factors — e.g., having both an Old Forest Road Encounters table and an Azure Fields Road Encounters table — is to make an encounter check for each applicable table.

In other words, if you’re in the Old Forest and you’re traveling on the road, then you’d roll on both the Old Forest Encounters table and the Road Encounters table. On the other hand, if you’re in the Old Forest and you’re traveling along the river, then you’d roll on both the Old Forest Encounters table and the River Encounters table.

This can obviously increase the likelihood of an encounter, so another option is to check for an encounter and then randomly determine which applicable encounter table to roll on. (For example, roll 1d6. On 1-4 check the region encounter table; on 5-6 check the method of travel encounter table.)

On the other hand, checking multiple tables can be a great way of generating simultaneous encounters, allowing you to combine them in myriad ways (as described in Part 5: Encounters).

DESIGN NOTE: SINGLE HEX ENCOUNTER TABLES

Once you start designing region-based encounter tables into your hexcrawls, a common trap is to get a little too specific. While you certainly can drill your specialized encounter tables down to a specific hex (or perhaps a few hexes), you’ll almost never want to do this because the value-to-prep ratio isn’t great.

For example, imagine that you create six hex-specific random encounters. Well… how many times are the PCs likely to have a random encounter in that specific hex? And are those random encounters really so specific to that hex that they couldn’t be included in a larger regional table?

If the answer to that last question is, “No,” then the most likely reason is because the encounters are associated to a location within the hex (e.g., there’s a specific troll who sometimes charges a toll on this specific bridge). But an encounter that’s so tightly associated with a specific location is just a detail of the location, not a random encounter.

There can easily be exceptions to this. For example, maybe only in this specific hex will one encounter the weird abominations created by the genetic magic Alburturan, which have escaped or been set loose near his tower. It can totally make sense to have an Alburturan Abominations table that only applies in this very specific area. (And maybe you could find some other use for that table in the tower itself, thereby increasing its prep value?)

The point is that, if you’re tempted to do this, double check to make sure it’s really necessary.

Another option to consider is that special features like Alburturan’s abominations might be hex features separate from the random encounter system. (You can find another example of this in the original 1974 edition of D&D, which included a separate check to determine whether or not the owner of a stronghold will “ride forth” to meet any PCs passing through the stronghold’s hex.)

DESIGN NOTE: FOLLOW YOUR PLAYERS

To return to the beginning, the easiest way to handle random encounters in your hexcrawl is with a single encounter table.

In fact, if you’re designing your first hexcrawl, I highly recommend doing exactly that.

As you’re running your hexcrawl, though, pay attention to where the PCs go and what they’re interested in: Are they spending a lot of time in the Old Forest? Are they asking a lot of questions about the Azure Fields? Then you might consider defining those regions and creating specialized encounter tables for them.

This doesn’t mean that you also need to immediately create encounter tables for every other region on your hexmap! You can just continue using your general Random Encounters table for all those other areas. Add complexity over time and let your players and actual play guide your focus to where your efforts will be best rewarded.

If you’re looking for an intermediary step, consider adding a “Regional Encounter” entry on your general Random Encounters table. You can then key a single appropriate encounter (or, alternatively, a smaller 1d4 or 1d6 table) to each region, which will be triggered when you roll that Regional Encounter on the general table. This can, of course, also serve as the seed for a full regional encounter table when the time comes.

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