Hex Mapping Part 1: Whys and Wherefores

Chatting with a friend about Scott’s recent discussion of hex maps at “Huge Ruined Pile” it was pointed out to me that there’s really not a good, step-by-step description of how to use hex maps in a game. Yeah, the reaction you likely just had was the same as mine, but trust me, there’s a heck of lot we take for granted. The early versions of D&D did such a poor job of explaining what it was about that lots of folks thought nothing about removing EXP for treasure, wandering monsters, or not tracking the passage of time.

So, just to be complete (or anal, take your pick), I’d like to go through the process here of building and using a hex map, integrating it with creating and running a campaign. I’m going to try not to skip stuff and take it for granted, but if anything is unclear or just vague, feel free to call me out on it.

WHY?

First off, why hex maps? They most likely came down to RPGs from a boardgame called Outdoor Survival (AKA “Nobody Survives Outdoors!”) in which your piece would be plopped into the middle of a wilderness area mapped on hexes. Hexes are superior for this purpose because they offer a lot more flexibility in movement compared to squares. Hexes do make a few measuring issues more complex, but we’ll get to that much later. But largely, they remove all the brain-breaking issues of attempting to reconcile diagonal movement that plague squares.

Now, you could just toss hexes entirely, but like square grids for dungeon maps, they do help organize and simplify mapping for you and your players. This is vital if you’re doing a hex-crawl style game like a West Marches campaign. Keeping things nice and regular simplifies everyone's lives. Especially since a hard-core hex-crawl is going to do all sorts of things to mess with the players’ maps already.

WAIT, WHAT?

I guess I should back up here and explain what I’m talking about. A hex-crawl is like a dungeon crawl without walls. You’re outdoors, moving from hex-to-hex, mapping the wilderness, fleeing from (or occasionally fighting) monsters, and looking for treasure and dungeons to loot. Players can (and will) move in any direction. The big challenge for them is judging how far they can get on their supplies (and, in this case, supplies mean hit points and spells as much as they mean food and water). Misjudge the issue, and they could end up expiring before returning to safety.

The fun is the joy of exploration, of overcoming the open-ended challenges of natural terrain, logistics, and risk-to-reward balancing. It’s not for everyone, and some are just as happy to go straight from the tavern right to the dungeon (Ptolus is largely based on this simplicity). But it adds a whole new dimension to your typical dungeon-based play that offers players all sorts of extra flexibility and choices, and generally, that’s a great thing in an old-school game.

Next time, we’ll talk about scale and terrain.

UPDATE:And it’s just been pointed out to me that the original West Marches game didn’t use hexes! Xp Ben Robbins apparently felt that hexes make people think they’ve fully explored an area when they’d filled in the hex. True, but I’ll stick by them; they make all sorts of things much easier. We’ll get into more detail on this later.

Hex Mapping Part 2: Scale

Cook’s Expert D&D says you should divide a character’s per-round movement by 5 to get the number of miles they can travel in day. At 120’ a character can move 24 miles in a day, but most groups will have someone down at the 90’ movement rate, and that would slow them to 18 miles per day. This isn’t unreasonable, as the Roman legions were thought to be incredibly fast at a speed of 20 miles per day, while Charlemagne's armies (which relied on ox-drawn carts to carry their gear and food) generally averaged just 12 miles a day. So a small band of heroes, on foot and over level ground, should be able to cover nearly 20 miles per day, especially if they’re exploring and mapping as the go.

Cook also recommends hexes that are six miles across. This works pretty well as it has our heroes crossing three or four a day. There are some other issues to keep in mind as you’re picking your scale.

One is sight distance. You don’t want the PCs to be able to see all of a single hex, especially if you’re going to be using wandering monster rolls. You may want lairs, camps, or even just the critters themselves to not be seen the first few times the PCs move through a hex (which helps explain why they’re suddenly popping up now that the dice say they should). Six-mile hexes mean each hex covers a bit more than 36 square miles. (Actually, it's a bit more than 30 square miles, but that doesn't throw us that far off. Thanks for catching my math-oops, JD!) That’s a lot of terrain for bandits or bears to hide in. Or even a castle if you need to drop one in after the fact.

Another question to consider is just what you can fit in a single hex. According to the medieval demographics calculators at the Domesday Book, a town of 5,000 people covers 83 acres, which is 0.13 square miles. Lots of room to lose small towns or villages (or orc camps) in a 6-mile hex. London in 1200 AD is assumed to have had a population of roughly 25,000. The Domesday Book page gives us a size of 412 acres, which is 0.64 square miles. At that same time, Rome was assumed to house 9,000,000 people. That may be too large for the Domesday Book page, and it returns a size of 148,258 acres or 231.65 square miles. That comes, very roughly, to 6-and-a-half of our 6-mile hexes. Paris’ population in 1200 was 110,000, which the Domesday Book page says should have covered 1,813 acres or 2.83 square miles, which fits comfortably in our 6-mile hex while still clearly dominating it.

The 6-mile hex works great for a muscle-powered world. If you want a world where people travel by jet-cycle, or live in massive cities like Tenochtitlan (possibly 212,500 people in 5.2 square miles not counting the greater metropolitan area) you might want to expand the size of you hexes. If, however, the world is full of dense jungles and tiny villages, a smaller hex (maybe 3 miles across, roughly a league) might be more appropriate.

UPDATE: More praise (and better math) for the six-mile hex at "The Hydra's Grotto."

Art by Ivan Constantinovich Aivazovsky and Alberto Pasini.

Hex Mapping Part 13: You Take the High Road and I'll Take the Low

Finally, back to the hex-mapping fun. What's the next step? That depends on how traditional you want to get. My game of choice these days is Labyrinth Lord/Moldvay/Cook B/X. The assumption of Moldvay and Cook was the players would graduate to hex crawling at the third or fourth level. Before then, the adventures would primarily be focused on dungeons.

If I was going to do things this way, I'd probably stop building the hex map now and refocus my efforts on one or two dungeon locations near the human city. It's still good to have mapped out the island as we have because I want to seed the dungeons with the promises of the hex-crawl. In this case, at least one of the dungeons would've been constructed by the wicked elves back when they ruled the island. I might also throw in a hint or two about the mind flayers or one of the dragons. I'd probably avoid using goblins since I want those to be one of the special parts of the jungle. I'd probably go with lesser undead, regular humans, and fantastical animals and follow the classic tropes of making each level more dangerous than the one above. I'd also strongly adhere to Moldvay's scheme of dungeon design in which a third of the treasure is in the hands of monsters, a third of the treasure is guarded by traps and a third of the treasure is undefended, though perhaps difficult to get to or find.

Optimally, the dungeons would be in, or very close, to the city. Part of the goal would be to solidify the human city as a home base for the PCs. One of the benefits of starting this way is that the players really learn their way around the human city. By this I don't mean geographically; the human city is mostly a safe place and I don't expect to do any urban crawling through it. I'm more talking about learning what resources the city has to offer and how to get them. They should learn which temples offer which services, what the alternatives to the temples are, if any, where they can (and can't) sleep safely for the night and store their treasure, and, of course, where they can acquire weapons, armor, and other supplies.

Finally, when I run hex-crawls, it can be important to have some idea of who the political and economic movers-and-shakers are in the civilized border area. There's an aspect of first contact in my hex crawls. The PCs are likely to find themselves ambassadors and go-betweens for both the human city and the monster civilizations they encounter. So there will at least be opportunities to explore the dungeons on behalf of, or under the patronage of, someone important in town.

I'm not going to go into too much detail here, because there are already some great resources for writing dungeons. With an eye on the above issues and prepping the campaign for the hex crawl to come, the dungeon should follow the usual design advice that works for low-level dungeoneering. That's not to say that they can't be unique. Only that there are well known methods for crafting a successful low-level dungeon and there's no reason not to use those here.

Next time, we go back to the hexes as we prepare to unleash our players upon them.

Hex Mapping Part 14: What do I See?

Whether you’ve opted to be a traditionalist and allow your players a few levels in the dungeon, or just decided to throw them straight into a hex crawl, eventually you’re going to have to deal with what, exactly, is in these hexes that we’ve mapped out. Six-mile hexes made sense in terms of long distance travel. In terms of what someone standing on the ground can see, however, they are absolutely absurd.

Our hex map is a gross abstraction. This is where you see the greatest divergence between a hex crawl and a traditional West Marches campaign. In a West Marches map it’s very important to mark minute details of the terrain since that is how the PCs are going to navigate across it. It’s very much a matter of moving from the river to the old, twisted oak, past the toppled menhir towards the ragged ridge.

Hex crawling is not like this at all. The basic unit of time measurement in hex-crawling is not the round or the minute or even the hour, but the day. The scale is not about searching for lost children or combing through forests to find a hidden shrine. It is more on par with the movements of armies, the interactions of nations, and the journeys of explorers.

Your hex map is a tool for improvisation but it cannot answer the question, “What do we see?” It can help you answer that question, and that’s exactly what it’s for. But it’s only a help. The DM of a hex crawl needs to be ready to fill in the fine details from the gross generalizations.

So what can be in a six-mile hex? Doc Rotwang turned to his own neighborhood to answer what could be found in a one-mile hex. I’m going to turn to history for my example. Specifically, what existed in Sherwood Forest?

We have a fairly good idea of the boundaries of Sherwood Forest because the term “forest” was more legal than botanical in medieval England. Using the 1232 borders (unfortunately many years after the death of King John, and so probably after the notorious banditry that would’ve inspired the legend of Robin Hood) we can see that it was roughly 6 miles wide and 24 miles north-to-south. This makes it almost perfectly fit four of our 6-mile hexes stacked atop each other. And what could a traveler in 13th century England expect to find in Sherwood Forest?

According to our map, the following: fourteen towns and villages, three abbeys, five hunting lodges, and three castles. Hardly a deserted and desolate place, even when not harboring a band of Merry Men.

This, then, is the other beauty of the six-mile hex. It’s literally big enough for you to put damn near anything you need in it, from a hidden bandit camp to a lost castle everyone forgot was there. The gross details we’ve plotted on our map are the things that are obvious: the large communities, the dominant terrain, that sort of thing. If you suddenly need a pond or a strange outcropping of mystical crystals, or the pillar of a cranky, misanthropic living saint, there’s more than enough room in each hex for you to include it. Suddenly dropping in a mountain with a 100-foot carving of a skull in its cliff-face might be a bit much, but short of that there’s lots of room for improvisation, the inclusion of new material (like a recently purchased adventure module), or whatever your random tables generate.

Next time, we’ll talk about more about random tables, since they’ll be your best friends when it comes to spicing up the PCs’ journeys across our hexed terrain.

Hex Mapping Part 16: to Fight the Horde and Singing and Crying...

Let’s start our discussion of random tables with the classic: wandering monsters.

Mr. Cook writes:

Encounters are usually checked for once per day, but the DM may include planned encounters, or may make additional checks if appropriate. No more than three or four encounter checks should be made per day.

Again, the time scale, like those for distance, is grossly large.The assumption is that the PCs will travel through a hex, jot down the principal terrain type, and then move on. Making only one or two wondering monster checks per day means that you can quickly mark off a handful of days fairly quickly. Cook suggests rolling a d6 to see if an encounter happens; in grasslands and hexes occupied by a civilized settlement, encounters have a 1-in-6 chance of happening. Most terrain has a 2-in-6 chance of generating an encounter, while jungles, swamps, and mountains have a 50% chance of generating an encounter.

That’s not a lot of encounters. Traveling across your fantasy version of the American Great Plains will allow your average group of PCs to cover 18 miles in a day (three hexes) and encounter wandering monsters only once per six days on average (or basically once every 108 miles).

In short, logistical shortfalls are of greater concern than monsters. That D&D is about exploration more than monster-mugging becomes abundantly clear in a hex-crawl. Logistics are a bigger issue than combat (and so we’ll take a closer look at it later, when we discuss hex-crawling from the picture side of the DM’s screen).

But wait, there’s more! If you use Moldvay’s Monster Reactions table (page B24 for those of you following along at home), combat becomes even less likely. That’s because it’s a 2d6 roll with the most common results (a roll of 6, 7, or 8) being “Uncertain, monster confused”. You’re just as likely to roll “Enthusiastic friendship” (a 12) as you are “Immediate Attack” (a 2). (Cook reproduces the table on page 23 of the Expert book when discussing outdoor encounters.)

And, just to lower the chances of combat even further, there is a chance for the PCs to evade the monsters. The table given decreases the chances for larger parties of PCs, and increases the chances for larger groups of monsters. A party of 5 to 12 PCs, hirelings, etc, has a 50% chance of evading a group of monsters numbering between 4 and 8, and a 70% chance of evading groups larger than that. Failure to evade still allows the PCs to flee “in a random direction (no mapping)” with a 50% of being caught if the monsters are faster. “This procedure is repeated until the party successfully evades or is caught. (This may result in the party being chased for several days, if the pursuers are really serious about catching them.)”

Two other things of note on wandering monsters: first, many are bestial, and so won’t be carrying treasure on them, unless the PCs are lucky enough to encounter them in their lair. Second, there is absolutely nothing done to match the levels of the PCs with the toughness of the monsters on the charts. In most terrains, Cook’s tables return a dragon (which could be a chimera, wyvern, basilisk, or salamander in addition to one of the classic color-coded wyrms) in one of eight encounters on average (one in four if the encounter is mountainous, hilly, or barren terrain).

The moral of our story here is that combat isn’t the fun in a hex-crawl. The real fun is exploration and discovery, and even a mid-level party is going to want to avoid most combats and needs to be willing to sacrifice their mounts if they encounter a hungry dragon or the like.

With this in mind, our two goals in creating a wandering monster table need to be 1: a random complication to the otherwise straightforward logistical challenges over overland travel and 2: an opportunity for interesting RPing encounters. We’ll tackle actually building some tables next time.

Hex Mapping Part 5 Addendum: Moral Landscapes

Getting back into the swing of blogging, I've been going back through my posts about hex-mapping. Part 5, where I discuss placing the terrain features that exist between mountains and coastline, brought to mind a conversation I had with a friend about alternatives to pseudo-realistic geography.

The guidelines I gave will tend to generate a landscape that is reasonably realistic. This should give you a map suitable for a campaign built around the assumptions that under-gird the stories of Conan, Elric, Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, or Odysseus. In short, it's designed to fit very well with what most of us consider the default assumptions of the early versions of D&D.

Good 'ol Appendix N has a lot more going on in it than just those stories. Consider the landscape of the Arthurian romances, for instance: trackless forests peppered with magical castles, enchanted pools, and bridges fashioned from giant swords. The lands of Narnia and Oz are like unto it. All of them share a moral component in their landscapes. The moral character of the land's rulers and inhabitants actively shapes the landscape.

In Part 5 of this series, geography informs the location of populations within it. A more Arthurian geography turns that on its head. The twisted and wicked troll king does not choose to live in lands of tangled brambles and sulfurous hot springs. Rather, whatever land the troll king chooses to dwell in will eventually become tangled with thorny brambles and dotted with sulfurous hot springs. Likewise, the lands around Camelot are not rich and fertile due to geography so much as the virtuous nature of the King and his court ("The land and the king are one.") Should that virtue be compromised, the land's fertility will suffer and fair weather will turn foul.

If that's more the feel you're going for, you should place your terrain features after you've decided who lives where. Kingdoms will tend to be small (most seemed to have but one large city, if that many, and it was centered around the capital castle) and there will be little trade between them. It wouldn't be unusual at all to come across some land or castle nobody from back home had ever heard of before. You might even easily cross between worlds without realizing it, a la the Mabinogian.

It doesn't need to be an either-or thing, of course. Tolkien's Middle Earth seems to borrow a bit from column A and a bit from column B here, where the geography itself is anthropomorphized enough to create its own moral atmosphere. Ancient tragedies create modern terrain hazards, but most of the world appears to operate under the forces of geology and meteorology well known to most of us. In such a world, the features of the troll king's kingdom have a certain chicken-or-the-egg mystery about them; does he live there because he chooses, does the landscape follow him, or does he create it somehow?

Hex Mapping Part 3: Hittin' the Beach

Ok, so three posts into this and we’re finally ready to whip out the hex paper! First question is, how big should our map be?

We want lots of room for exploration, clearly. If you’re running an "open table" sort of game, as West Marches is, where you’ll have lots of groups running around, you’ll want both lots of room to explore and multiple directions to explore at a time.

(The actual, hex-less West Marches game was probably a lot smaller than this, since Mr. Robbins encouraged navigation by landmarks. That sort of play encourages a much more intimate knowledge of the terrain than a hex map will usually give you, and six miles is a huge distance if your landmarks are things like unusual rock formations, big trees, or sinkholes.)

Just to pick a dimension at random, saying that our map takes a full month of travel to cross from one end to the other sounds good, yes? Since we’ll want a wide array of terrain types, let’s say we can expect people to move at an average pace of 12 miles per day. That comes to a map that’s 360 miles (30 days x 12 miles) across. If we simply square that, we’ve got an area of 129,600 square miles.

How’s that square with the real world? Well, it’s a hint more than 150% the size of Great Britain. That should be more than big enough to give us all the adventure we need, at least for the first few levels.

360 miles is 60 hexes (360 miles / 6 miles-per-hex). We’ll start a bit bigger than that, since we don’t want to just create a simple, square plain. I also want a bit of a border because I’m going to draw an island.

“Here Am I, Your Special Island”
Why an island? Islands work great for hex-crawling games. First, they give the area of play a solid and unequivocal boundary in the sea. When the PCs reach the ocean, the players know they’ve reached the edge of the map. At the same time, it’s not an insurmountable barrier; players can buy boats and sail outward to new lands if they get tired of the starting area (or if it gets too dangerous for them).

Plus, I never did get around to adding anything to the Seas of Os’r project, so...

When starting a new map, it’s generally a good idea to start at the bottom and work your way up. Most times, that means sea level and your coastline. Coastlines generally come in two flavors: soft and rocky. The Texas gulf coast, for instance is soft, the beaches sandy, the land clay. So you get a nice, smooth coastline, with long barrier islands just offshore.

The other option is rocky and that usually means jagged, like the fjords of Finland or Denmark, though it can mean smooth, like the cliffs of Dover. In either case, you’re likely to end up with lots of little islands off the coast, but not the long, delicate barrier islands of a soft coast.

Since I’m going with an island, I’m thinking volcanoes. And I’m thinking tropical, too, because I’m kinda on a tropical kick just lately. So we’ll start with something a bit softer, like Hawaii and its collection of shield volcanoes. Saving the volcanoes for later, here’s the coastline.

Just one big island. Why? Because we want the coastline to signal to the players, “Hey, this is the edge of the map.” We want to encourage them to explore the island as much as possible before they hop on a boat and head for the horizon. Still, dividing our island into clearly recognizable sections is a good idea for all sorts of reasons. We’ll do that next week as we swing to the other extreme, jumping from sea level to maximum elevation when we place our volcanoes and mountains.

UK map from the CIA's World Factbook. Satellite image of Padre Island, TX from these folks. They have lots of great pics of geological formations of all kinds, so be sure to explore. My map was done in Hexographer to save y'all from having to decipher my pathetic chicken-scratches.

Hex Mapping Part 6: Who Are the People in Your Neighborhood?

Finally, we’re ready to begin populating our island. This is probably my favorite part of world building.

First, an important note about hex-crawling. The bedrock assumption of the hex crawl is that the area the PCs will be exploring is mysterious and unknown to them. There are no maps existing already that show what they should expect to find. The point is for the PCs to fill in the blanks spaces.

Towards this end, the outposts of civilization (or, at least, the civilization the PCs belong to) should be few. On our map, there will be only a handful, and all clustered close together.

So, starting at the top, we put a large city where the northern-most river meets the sea. I want a fairly serious city so that the PCs can expect to buy anything they might need: triremes and mounts, porters or slaves, powerful healing magic, and someone who can remove curses or similar unfortunate magics for a price. You can fudge this a bit by making the city heavily focused; the Pitsh of my Doom & Tea Parties campaign is a theocratic community that grew up around a temple to Uban that itself was focused on exploring the island of Dreng Bdan and plundering its ruins. That means it is much richer in clerical resources than you’d normally expect from a city its size.

For our hex-map island's human city, I’m thinking it’s an outpost of the Sea Lords, a city-state that only recently won its independence from another such state. Possibly a brother or nephew of some other Sea Lord or some such. It’s a port-of-call for pirates and smugglers, but also an important shipyard for same. Up-river, in the jungle hexes, I’ll put one or two villages that are based on logging. They’ll float their lumber down river to the city where it’s transformed into new ships. I’ll also drop in a few villages in the clear hexes where farmers grow food to support the city and the loggers.

This part of the island is pretty well explored, and when I hand the PCs a map of the island, the part north of that V of mountains will be largely filled in. So will the coastline, but nothing else; due to the city-state’s battle for independence, they’ve not really had the chance to explore the interior yet. That’s where the PCs come in.

Some critters are so dangerous, they’re practically forces of nature in their own right. Dragons come to mind. I want three on this island. The youngest, a male red, lives in the extinct volcano just north of the mysterious plateau. The oldest, a female red and possibly the mother or grandmother of the young red, lives in the dead volcano just north of the grey volcanic ash wastes. And I’m thinking there’s a green somewhere in those jungles on the eastern side of the island. I could put a black in those hills surrounded by swamp along the eastern coast, but I’ve got other ideas for that part of the world.

I want to place the dragons now because they'll likely distort the social map. Few people want to live next-door to a dragon. Now that I've got a good idea of where there be dragons, I can start plopping down the more civilized, social monsters. And we'll get to that next week.

Art by Frederick Arthur Bridgman and Albert Bierstadt.

Hex Mapping Part 18: In the Hot Seat

On the subject of random tables, someone recently asked me, "how much is enough?" That really depends on you and your skills as a DM.

The dungeon isn't just easier for players. It's also noticeably easier for GM's. Each room is usually a unique experience. You almost never see dungeons consisting of the same type of room over and over again. Why would you do that to your players? It's boring.

Now let's take a look at our wilderness map. It's got a lot of the same sort of hexes right next to each other. To the west, we have lots and lots of savanna. In the east, it's lots and lots of jungle. In terms of geography this looks right. In terms of running a D&D adventure this looks like a nightmare. How in the world are you going to prevent this hex crawl from devolving into an endless repetition of "another two hexes of jungle"?

If you happen to be one of these amazingly creative types who can come up with interesting stuff on the spur of the moment, you've got no problem. This map plus some wandering monster tables should give you all you need to create interesting terrain and situations for your players to deal with. If that's not you, however, you might want more help. And you can give yourself all the help you need with more random tables!

Keep in mind, however, that were still talking about a fairly gross scale for all of this. So the sort of things we want to be talking about are probably going to be those things that you almost assuredly can't miss if you enter one of our 6 mile hexes. So most of the interesting features we should be talking about need to be at least a mile long, tall enough to be seen from miles away, or extremely flashy.

Any day (but not night) where a random monster isn't encountered, or some other interesting terrain feature (like a village or river) isn't encountered, roll a d12 and consult the following table for the jungle:

1: Nothing.

2: More nothing.

3: Even more nothing.

4: Short cliff of obsidian, measuring 3d4 feet high and 1d4 miles long.

5: Elven ruins built around a circle of massive crystal menhirs. Any magic-user spells cast while standing inside the circle are treated as being cast by a magic-user or elf of 150% their level (round down). If the moon is full, then treat the spell as being cast by someone with twice the level of the caster.

6: Empty monster lair. Roll on the wandering monster to table to see the type of monster, then roll for its treasure as per normal. 1d6 x 10% of the rolled treasure is here. If the monster rolled is sentient, there may be traps.

7: Quicksand! Double movement penalties through one hex.

8: Ancient Goblin Burial Ground. If players search this area, they can collect 2d100 copper pieces, 1d100 silver pieces, and 10d100 gold pieces worth of jewelry every hour, for 1d4 hours. However, for every hour that they actually find something, there is a 1-in-4 chance that they will be assaulted by 1d100 goblin skeletons the following night.

9: PCs stumble across the corpse of a dead adventurer. The human died of disease and/or infected wounds. The corpse will have fairly standard adventuring gear, plus one random potion. There's a 1-in-6 chance the corpse was carrying a map of the area and that this map hasn't been completely destroyed by moisture. It will reveal 1d4 hexes in each direction from the current location (roll separately
for each direction).

10: Ancient Shrine. Roll randomly to determine the alignment of the deities the shrine was dedicated to. Clerics of compatible alignments who meditate or pray at this shrine will be able to cast an additional 1st level spell the next day. Clerics of the opposite alignment will have the next spell they cast with a random component behave as if the lowest possible number was rolled.

11: An especially monstrous tree. If the PCs scale the tree to its top (this will eat 3 hours for up and down) they can map out every surrounding hex.

12: PCs stumble across the entrance to a dungeon!

Hex Mapping Part 20: The Politics of Hex Crawling

So, the PCs are all eager to head into the wilderness. You've got it mapped out, you have your random tables at hand, and you're ready to rock-and-roll.

What next?

Traditionally, the most defining feature of a hex-crawl is resource management. The further the PCs get from civilization, the better the rewards and the cooler the encounters. But the further they also have to go to replace consumed supplies, destroyed equipment, and lost mounts and hirelings. There's an obvious solution to this problem: the PCs can get their supplies from the monsters.

Sure, they can pillage and plunder their way across the landscape, but that only works so long as they encounter groups that are relatively easy to defeat in battle. And that's not what I'm talking about here.

Unless you're running the sort of game where monsters are the physical manifestations of an ambient and utterly evil malevolence, they'll have functioning communities and economies. These might be really small communities and extremely basic economies; I'm thinking my goblin tribes are 200 to 600 individuals with fairly advanced neolithic tech. But they sell the PCs arrows, mounts, and food, while the tribe's shamans can provide extremely basic (ie levels 1-3) magical services.

Once your players have made that leap, things can get really interesting. Clearly, there's conflict between the various monster groups on the island I've mapped out. In the east, we have goblins vs. lizardfolk vs. orcs vs. bullywugs. But there's no reason you can't make it more granular. Maybe the individual goblin tribes don't always get along well. As the old saying goes: me against my brother; my brother and me against my cousin; me, my brother, and my cousin against the stranger.

A variation on Zak's Connections Between NPCs Diagram from Vornheim is great for this sort of thing. You can scale it up for allied nations of villages, or down to cliques among the females in a single village.

Generally, you want to move from the micro to the macro in this. In the first village the players attempt to deal with, maybe they'll get involved in a fight over the chieftainship of the village. After that, they could improve their relations with the new powers-that-be by championing that village against another. And then help cement an alliance of goblin villages to thwart raids by lizardfolk slavers...

For your part, don't be thinking more than one or two opportunities ahead. Scatter a few opportunities before your players and let 'em play with the ones that interest them. It's usually not worth it to try to guess what the players will do; they'll frequently surprise you. Look at what happened, who benefited and who got a bloody nose, and build the next set of opportunities on that.

And always keep an eye on the horizon. Who are the monsters the players are dealing with dealing with in turn? How can you draw the attention of the players out towards the next line of hills, across the next river? You're weaving an interconnected world here, not telling a village-of-the-week story. Always be tossing out links to the big picture, or having macro concerns affecting micro challenges.

Art by Arthur Rackham.

Hex Mapping Part 19: There’s Gold in Them Thar Hills!

We’ve got a map, we’ve got our random tables, and we’ve got a team of players ready to tackle our wilderness hex map. Taking a peek at the view from the players’ side of the DM’s screen, the obvious question for them is: why go?

Dungeons are great for players. They know exactly where the monsters are likely to come from, they are full of treasure, and they are relatively easy to map. In the wilderness, there’s much less treasure per square mile, the monsters are not easily categorized in terms of toughness by your depth beneath the earth, and they can pounce you from nearly any direction.

So why should they go out there?

Seven Cities of Gold: There’s some insanely fabulous treasure out there. If the PCs find it, it’ll easily kick them to the next level, maybe higher since it’ll probably take multiple trips to bring it all back to civilization. It’s brimming with magic in the form of lost spells, swords fabled in the annals of history, and holy relics. If the PCs find it, they can buy their own private island and retire as kings!

If I was going this route with my current map, the big haul would, of course, be in the sheltered valley at the center of the map. But the entire island would be scattered with clues as to its whereabouts, and maybe bits of related treasure would be seen in other hauls. If the campaign begins with some dungeon runs, they’d find hints about the treasure to whet their appetites in those dungeons first.

Of course, if you’ve got seven cities of gold to hunt down, maybe the PCs uncover the smaller ones before working their way to the capital.

The Legolas & Gimli Expedition: Powerful (or, at least, wealthy) interests back in civilization want the wilderness mapped and they’re willing to pay to have it done. Usually, there’s a flat fee for every hex mapped (60 gp or so, depending on the size of the party), which encourages both caution and speed to earn relatively easy money. Bonuses will be awarded for securing resources that are of interest to the PCs’ patron. Maybe they want logging or mining rights, or negotiated trade settlements with the natives. Or, in the case of the classic Keep on the Borderlands, the lords of a newly settled castle need the surrounding territory explored and cleared of monsters, so the bonus is on monster heads.

Missing Persons: There’s somebody out there the PCs want to find: lost family members, kidnapped princesses, or hated enemies the PCs want to track down and slay. Be careful about dragging this one out too much; there’s only so much “your princess is in another castle” most players will put up with.

Lost: I’m a big fan of shipwrecks, defeated armies, or other variations on the theme of being stranded out in the wilderness as a way to start off a campaign. The caveat with these is that, once the PCs find their way back home, they might have little incentive to return to the wilderness.

There’s no reason, of course, you can’t mix-and-match these. In fact, you probably should. “Yes, we know you just escaped from the goblin-infested jungles of the eastern coast after being shipwrecked, but you now know that territory better than anyone, and we’re certain the fabled Tower of the Stars is out there somewhere. Here are the clues we have to its location...”

Don’t fret too much about keeping the PCs out in the wilderness after they’ve spent some time exploring, making friends and enemies, and learning the lay of the land. These are all just baits for the hook of a persistent world that reacts to their presence in it. We’ll talk more about that next time.

Hex Mapping Part 12: Workin’ in a Coal Mine, Workin’ Downtown...

Last weekend somebody asked me, "do you really do this much work before starting a campaign?"

My reply: oh, heck no!

What I have posted so far would be the work of a lazy afternoon. Over the span of 2 to 3 hours I would have scribbled out a map with pencil and paper and jotted down maybe a page or two of notes. I could have just shown you that, but would you have been able to make any sense out of "orcs" and "mind flayers" with an arrow pointing between them?

So I downloaded Hexographer and wrote up fairly detailed descriptions, or, at least, much more detailed than I would have written for just myself. If you've been at this for any period of time, you certainly have already developed a shorthand for describing places and monsters and situations your players are likely to encounter.

Evan at In Places Deep touches on this when discussing this picture of Gygax at the gaming table. You also see a lot of this in the Zak's Vornheim. We don't really need to be that detailed. Hex crawls are primarily powered by improvisation. What we've done so far is just give ourselves enough of a framework to build on as the players explore our island. We'll be hitting this point a lot. Most of the tools that we're going to develop are aids to improvisation. This includes the map I've been talking about for the past two weeks, the random encounter tables we’ll be tackling in the future and any other bits and bobs that invoke randomness (like random weather tables) or terrain details.

Unlike a West Marches game, classic hex crawls are not about going over the land with a fine-toothed comb. It's more on par with the Lewis and Clark expedition, exploring the terrain at a land-eating pace where one of the primary motivations is discovering what cool things the DM has hidden just beyond the horizon. The double-sided purpose of the map we have made is to both inspire and leave room for cool things to tantalize and dazzle our players with.

Hex Mapping Part 17: You're Everything That a Big Bad Wolf Could Want

I'm going to assume that most of you are already familiar with wandering monster tables. The idea is pretty simple: you write up a list of monsters you want the players to be able to encounter and then number them so that they can be chosen by a die roll.

The outdoor wondering monster list in Cook's Expert book is a little more complex. It involves nested lists; that is rolling on one list references other lists. The monsters are grouped by similarity. For instance, the lists you can roll for a swamp encounter include Men, Flyer, Humanoid, Swimmer, Undead, Insect, and Dragon. Each of these send you to another list which actually includes the monsters. Not only does this give you a huge variety of monsters without having to resort to d100s, it also makes certain types of monsters more common in one place that in another. In the swamp list Undead appear twice. Animal is listed twice for the woods list, and Men is listed six times for encounters in a hex that includes a city.

When it comes to actually listing the monsters, some tables just list the names and often in alphabetical order. Again, redundancy is used to increase the likelihood of encountering a particular type of critter. This is the sort of wandering monster table most of us are used to.

In Vault of the Drow, Gygax gives us a very different sort of list. His wandering monster lists include detailed groups, each of which has a specific purpose or goal that they are pursuing when the PCs encounter them. Zack does something very similar with his expansive random encounter lists in Vornheim.

The great thing about these lists is that they do a lot of the heavy lifting for you. You don't have to guess why this particular band of slaves and drow overseers are wandering through the fungus forest. Gygax lays it all out for you. The bad thing about this sort of list is that you can only roll on it so many times before it starts repeating itself. Zack suggests crossing encounters off in his lists and replacing them with new ones as they are used.

Cook's list is the opposite. Even if your rolls do turn up two different groups of nomads, the lack of details means its very easy for you to make each distinctive. Unfortunately, by that same token, it's entirely up to you, in the heat of the moment, to make them distinctive. If you're good at that sort of on-the-fly encounter creation, this is great. Not everyone is, though, and you're going to be rolling on these tables a lot as you run your hex crawl. There's no reason you can't give yourself a little more help if you need it.

So let’s investigate a compromise option. In addition to a list of monsters, you can also use a list of motivations. This simply tells us what is foremost on the mind of the wandering monster. It serves principally as a springboard for improvisation.

You can roll all the dice at once, but I'd suggest rolling the monster first and then the motivation. I designed this list so that rolling a 2d4 returns a reasonable motivation for bestial monsters. For sentient creatures, roll a 1d10.

1. - diplomacy
2. - patrolling territory
3. - hurt
4. - horny
5. - hungry
6. - napping
7. - fighting! (roll again on the wandering monster table to see who the monsters you first rolled are, or are planning on, fighting)
8. - home
9. - raiding
10. - art

This list is purposefully vague. “Diplomacy” might mean you’ve encountered an envoy from one tribe to another, or it might mean a caravan carrying tribute, or a craftsman gathering materials to build a peace-offering. “Horny” might mean a couple preparing to get frisky, humanoids raiding to engage in a bit of bride-kidnapping, or a more poetic soul pining for a lost love. “Home” could mean they’re in their lair, or they’re seeking a new lair, or they’re improving their lair in some way.

Now we simply combine this with territory-specific lists of creatures. This list is for the eastern jungles. If the PCs are traveling through the goblin territory, roll a d8. If they are in the Lizardfolk territory, roll 3d4. When they have reached the orc territories, you can roll a 5d4. And you can always roll a straight-up d20 when you want something really random.

1 - goblins
2 - rock baboon
3 - python
4 - giant bees
5 - crab spiders
6 - goblins with (roll a d6):

1 - 2: harmless giant spider mounts (doubles movement rate)
3: black widow spider mounts
4 - 6: tarantella spider mounts

7 - lizardfolk
8 - black widow spiders
9 - basilisk
10 - lizardfolk mounted on tuatara lizards
11 - spitting cobra
12 - orcs mounted on dire wolves
13 - hydra
14 - orcs
15 - ogre
16 - robber fly
17 - orcs
18 - wolves
19 - ogres riding elephants
20 - displacer beasts

There is, of course, lots of room for expanding this list. I didn’t manage to get most of the giant lizards listed in Moldvay’s Basic, for instance, or any fey, etc. But this, combined with our motivations table and the reactions table mentioned last time, gives us a good working list that can provide a wide variety of encounters on the fly.

Hex Mapping Part 15: Getting Random

Embracing the hex-map-as-improvisational-tool, we’ll want to develop other, similar tools as sort of utility-multipliers for it. The most traditional of these is the random table. And the most traditional random table is the wilderness wandering monster table. But there’s no reason to stop there. You can create random tables for all sorts of things, including:

• unusual land formations.
• results for hunting, fishing, and foraging.
• disasters like earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, hail storms, etc.
• weather.
• frequency of and style of the ubiquitous defensive terrain the PCs will always want to camp in.
• celestial phenomena like auroras, shooting stars, blood-red moons, etc.
• bizarre animal behavior like birds trying to bury themselves or spontaneous sponge migrations.
• magical effects, like magic being stronger or weaker, or rivers that steal your memories, or portals to other planes or other spots on the map.

There’s no need to go crazy here; none of these are mentioned in Cook’s Expert book, for instance, and so you can probably get along just fine without them. Still, if there’s any aspect that you consistently find yourself flummoxed on when the players ask about it, go ahead and make a table.

In my Doom & Tea Parties game, the PCs have been very careful to be well-supplied before leaving town, but they’re always asking me about the layout of their camp. A good random table simply helps me not repeat myself too often. Magic is extremely rare (so I don’t bother with a table of wacky magical effects or strange animal behavior, since anything the PCs see along those lines is extremely important and crafted to fit the situation) and the island of Dreng Bdan, like the one we’ve been building for this series of articles, is in the tropics, so the weather is fairly predictable (rain every day during the rainy season, hot the rest of the time).

The key to a good random table is to not put more than you need to inspire you on it. The more detailed the table is, the less flexible it is. Here’s the table I’ve been using to describe defensively-positioned campsites in the jungle:

Roll a d10 1d4 times on the following table.

1: water (stream, river, pond)
2: boulders
3: hollow tree (strangler fig)
4: fallen tree
5: thorn bushes
6: cliff or ledge
7: sink hole
8: quicksand
9: insects
10: tangle of vines.

By rolling on this table, I get a series of barriers that the PCs will use to guard one or more flanks of their camp. Some are potentially as dangerous to the PCs as they are to any attackers (like the insects or the stream if its inhabited by nixies), and I usually describe these features to the PCs to see if they want to accept the site or if they want to keep searching for something a bit safer.

It’s the combination of a random number of randomly generated features that keeps this list from looking like too much of the same thing over and over again. All of these are things you’d expect to find in a jungle, and so a certain amount of repetition is fine, even builds a sense of verisimilitude, but the combos are going to be unique enough to spur my own imagination when necessary. You may find your own imagination needs fewer or more details. As always, season to taste.

Hex Mapping Part 11: Tyger! Tyger! Burning Bright

“Oh,” say those who have played in my campaigns before, “here’s where he’s putting in the rakshasa.”

I'm a big fan of rakshasa, whether you're talking about the tiger-headed sorcerers of D&D or the shape-shifters of Hindu and Buddhist lore. There are a handful of monsters I just really love using, and I try to include them in every campaign. I doubt I'm unique in this, so when building your own hex crawl be sure to keep your favorites in mind.

In this case, I'm putting them in a city in the hills where the river bifurcates. It was originally built hundreds of years ago by the elves, and was one of the last abandoned by them. (Note that this also gives us an excuse to cover the countryside with abandoned elven ruins.) It's ruled by a family (or perhaps feuding families) of rakshasa. Most of the inhabitants, however, are less dangerous humanoid monsters, probably gnolls (another favorite monster), minotaurs, and maybe unusual merochi families.

Along the river exist small communities and individual freeholds of thri-kreen. These were left behind by the elves when they abandoned this area. South of the city, in the swamps along the coastline of the delta, are hidden villages of turtlefolk. Both avoid the city as much as possible.

In the plains on either side of the river wander clans of wemic. In the hills to the north and east are small clans of hill giants. Both of these prey upon the thri-kreen to keep as slaves for themselves or to sell in the rakshasas' city. Moon beasts may also be involved in this trade.

The broken lands to the west and north are a veritable maze of shattered stones, defiles, ravines, small canyons, and lava tubes. This territory is claimed by a number of minotaur clans. Successfully navigating this maze will lead you to the active volcano at the southernmost tip of our secret plateau. Here, a fortress inhabited by fire giants guards the entrance to the plateau.

What's in the plateau? No idea just yet. But there's still no rush to fill that in. On Friday, will back up, survey what we've done, and discussed how I would actually accomplish this much for normal game I was planning to run.

Hex Mapping Part 7: Tradition! (Dai-dai-dai-dai-dai...)

Generally speaking, a hex map should work very much like a dungeon map: the “deeper” you go, the more dangerous the critters should be. The caveat on that is, in the wilderness, the PCs have a lot more flexibility when it comes which encounters they tackle with combat and which they avoid entirely. There’s just a lot more mobility in the wilderness, and if the PCs ever come across a population they don’t want to fight, they can generally get around them somehow.

So we’ll start with a fairly traditional low-level monster: goblins. The eastern jungles below the V of the mountains and north of the first river is peppered with small goblin tribes. Most are probably nomadic hunter-gatherers, but some will be organized into actual static villages. The further south you go, the more organized the tribes are and the more they’re likely to have domesticated giant spiders. I could even see some of these guys dressing up in spider-inspired war costumes.

Those living close to the southern river are in a constant state of low-level conflict with their neighbors. There are raids across the river going both ways. In the jungles between the two rivers live lizardfolk. While less numerous than the goblins, they are a lot more organized, and possess an actual city along the edge of the mountains. It’s an ancient ruin built in their prouder days (or possibly by another race entirely?) where their immortal king (who is actually the green dragon who disguises himself with magic) lives and rules over them.

While the goblins are almost certainly to turn out to be foes of the PCs (though playing one tribe off against another certainly is a possibility) the lizardfolk might turn out to be fairly friendly to the PCs. Having groups that are potential allies is important, especially if you use advancement rules like Jeff’s Carousing rules or LotFPWFRP’s insistence that only treasures returned to civilization count. The deeper the PCs travel into the wilderness, the harder it’s going to be for them to return to Home Base between missions. You need to give them some way to replenish their expendable supplies and level up. Allies can do that for you. We’ll be revisiting this topic later.

The goblins are little more than an annoyance to the lizardfolk and their wyrm-king. Their other two neighbors are far more threatening. To the east are the bullywugs that live in the massive swamp that spans the shoreline between the two rivers. The swamp is a spooky, eldritch place, teeming with carnivorous plants, strange creatures, and mysterious phenomena. The rocky hills in the center of the swamp are holy places to the bullywug, where their living ancestors dwell.

Relations between the bullywugs and the lizardfolk are fairly quiet most of the time. Every generation or so, however, the bullywugs swarm out of the swamps in great numbers, bent on pillage and destruction. The lizardfolk have erected a few forts, mostly of earth and wood, to guard against these occasional invasions.

Of greater concern to the lizardfolk are the orcs that live south of the river. Raids and skirmishes across the river are common in both directions. The orcs have matched the forts of the lizardfolk with tall stone towers of their own. While the jungle claimed by the orcs is vast and includes many different tribes, the orcs seem capable of banding together quickly, and even engaging in long-term projects such at the building and garrisoning of the towers. An alliance between the lizardfolk and the fey living in the southern river (a clan of potent nixies) is one of the reasons the lizardfolk haven’t simply been overwhelmed yet by the orcs.

The source of the orcs’ inexplicable organizational abilities is not guessed at by even most of the orcs. In truth, their chieftains and shamans are all in thrall to a cabal of mind flayers who dwell deep beneath the mountain range that makes up the western boundaries of their domain. A complex system of potlatch and raiding between the orcs sends a steady stream of slaves and treasure to the mind flayers in their hidden caverns. The principle foe of the mind flayers is the living ancestors of the bullywugs. To date, however, attempts to invade the jungle with
massed orc hordes have failed to penetrate deeper than a dozen miles beyond the river.

So that’s the eastern quarter of the island. Next time, we’ll populate the western quarter with some less-traditional critters.

Hex Mapping Part 4: Mountains and Subdivisions

As promised, today we’re talking about mountains. Now that we have our coastline defined, we can chop up our big, flat island into more digestible chunks. Mountains work really well for this purpose because they are both a physical boundary but also permeable. Mountain slow you down, but they don't stop you necessarily.

This makes them useful for the players as internal boundaries inside the island. And they work well for the DM because mountains have frequently served as cultural boundaries in the real world. The Alps marked the boundary between Italy and Gaul just as the Pyrenees mark the boundary between France and Spain. Mountains work better for this purpose than rivers because rivers are facilitators of mobility instead of inhibitors. Rivers encourage motion; mountains discourage it.

So the players will use our mountains to define geographic subdivisions of our island. We will encourage this behavior by using mountains to separate cultural and racial groups.

More about that later. Right now, we just need to chop up this big Island into more digestible bits. So I'll go ahead and slap down some chains of mountains radiating from the center of our island out towards some of the points.

(If you wanted to, you could extend these mountains out into the sea as islands. You can see this sort of thing in the Aleutian Islands of Alaska. But keep in mind we want to encourage our players to stay on the island and not give them small, tempting distractions just offshore. So we’ll stop our mountain chains well short of the coast.)

As you can see, I've chopped my island into six sections. Some are a little big, especially the ones on the eastern side, so I'll probably want to vary the terrain a little bit over there. The northern section is the smallest, so I'll probably make that the "safe zone" of civilization. Finally, I put a ring of mountains in the center of the island. This is going to be our mysterious and difficult to reach plateau. It's perfect for a “lost world” teeming with dinosaurs, ancient lost civilizations, or crashed spaceships à la Expedition to the Barrier Peaks. I have no idea yet what I'm going to put there, but that's okay. We're still only just getting started.

Now that we have mountains and the coastline defining our highest and lowest spots, we can put in rivers. Assuming your world works under the same general principles as ours does, water will flow downhill. Find some likely spots, and draw some squiggly river lines heading towards the coast. Rivers tend to do one of two things when flowing from a mountain to the sea; they either separate into smaller rivers, or merge into bigger rivers. If you want some massive artery like the Mississippi or the Amazon, have lots of rivers flow into one. If you have a good fan-shaped piece of coastline your river can fan out into a delta like the Nile.

Don't go too crazy with the rivers. Not every nook and cranny of your coastline requires a river flowing into it. On a map this size, a handful should serve you well. If you've already located what you consider to be choice spots for civilization, go ahead and put a river by that. Communities love rivers. But we'll get to those later. We've still got to finish our geography first.

Hex Mapping Part 8: Go For the Eyes, Boo. Go For the Eyes!

If you’ve been reading my blog (or many others in the OSR) for any length of time, you’ve likely seen praise heaped on Taichara’s Hamsterish Hoard of Dungeons & Dragons. Taichara doesn’t post often (the site is on hiatus right now) but when she does, it’s amazing stuff. Even better, if your players don’t read blogs much, they’ve likely missed out on all the hamsterish goodness. So they’ll have no idea what hit them after you unleash the hoard’s hordes upon them. Muah-ha-haaa...

I’ll be returning to the Hamsterish Hoard repeatedly for inspiration and monsters. Today, I’m going to use one of my personal favorites, the ankeri.

South and west of that northern V of mountains that cradle the human settlements, a pair of rivers wind out of the mountains, through some hilly terrain, and then join before continuing down to a swampy delta and then into the sea. Nestled along these waterways are the handful of villages and towns of the ankeri. Their homes are made of kiln-baked bricks and thatched with the grasses and reeds of the rivers. In addition to chickpeas and grains, the ankeri also farm papyrus (for they are a highly literate society) and various breeds of hamsters from which they weave an especially fine and water-resistant wool. Cricipters, especially albino ones, can also be found in grand aviaries in some of their temples, as they are seen as the messengers of the gods and the bringers of love and fertility.

The ankeri nation is a loose confederacy woven together by a shared faith. The supreme position of their priests makes their nation technically a theocracy, but it is a tolerant one that primarily wields influence though judicial means. Most personal matters and conflicts between clans are settled through an ornate and festive dueling culture. Matters that touch on the larger community are brought before a council of priests to adjudicate.

The ankeri are likely to serve as another group that might prove friendly to the PCs, or at least willing to deal with them as commercial customers. Trusted PCs may be able to buy maps of the lands surrounding the river communities of the ankeri. Even the best maps, however, won’t show anything beyond the mountains. So far as the ankeri are concerned, that’s terra incognita.

Cohesion among the ankeri is reinforced by their neighbors: two nations of merochi which live on opposite sides of the river, bracketing the ankeri civilization between them. (Hey, it’s my blog, I’m gonna pimp my critters too!) Each nation has its own ceremonial center, a broad plaza surrounded by stone-walled, curve-roofed barracks for visitors, the small complex where the priestesses who tend the site dwell, and a ziggurat temple. Few merochi can be found here, however; most dwell in scattered settlements where the males raise the young and supervise the slaves who tend their fields (many of whom are ankeri or gelded males) while the females hunt.

There’s a lot of interaction between the ankeri and merochi. The ankeri sell the merochi most of their pottery, clothing, and jewelry. In return, the merochi sell the ankeri leather, feathers, captured animals, and their services as mercenaries. Unattached merochi males frequently serve as guards in the homes of wealthy ankeri, or in the clan caravans of the sau'inpu merchants who travel between the settlements of both ankeri and merochi.

Among the slaves of the southern-most merochi are gnolls and thri-kreen. They can tell the NPCs something of the bizarre lands that lie further south, where the volcanoes still rumble with angry life, and fill the skies with clouds of strange ash.

And now a musical interlude: But-kicking For Goodness!

Fun Dice Tricks with Map Crow

Map Crow is a YouTube vlog that’s hit-and-miss with me; when it’s hot, it’s pretty hot, but when it’s not, it’s pretty meh.  FOR ME, I’ll hasten to point out; there’s a lot of stuff being discussed out there this old troll has seen many different times over the years, nuggets of wisdom rediscovered by new generations.  Reminds me that sometimes the topic I think has been done to death is, in truth, a brand new revelation for somebody, especially with so many new folks entering the hobby.

 

Anyway, Map Crow’s latest is on fun random encounter tables, and he does some really neat stuff using 2d6.  The sum of 2d6 gives you what the encounter is, while the red d6 tells you what the disposition of the encounter, while the blue d6 gives you their distance from the party.  Check it out; he does some fun things with the interaction between the bell-curve and the flat curves, making a the extremely rare roll of snake-eyes really, really ouch.

 

His division of his map is similar to what I did when talking about Hex Mapping, but combining the table, the disposition, and the distance all in one roll is very clever.  I’ll still probably default to my own What-Are-the-Monsters-Up-To table (I’m too much in love with how you can roll differently for intelligent and bestial encounters on the same table), but game must recognize game!

Ow...

Yeah, so this is when I'm supposed to review last year's resolutions and look ahead to this year with some new ones.

Ouch.

I think I managed to achieve just two of my resolutions for 2011. Oddysey did run some Pathfinder for me, and I did do more book reviews.

Everything else?

Ouch.

To say 2011 was not a banner year for this blog is an understatement. It wasn't a banner year for pretty much any aspect of my life. It wasn't the worst year (far from it!) but I can't say I'll look back on it very fondly, beyond a few bright spots here and there, mostly to be found in the first half.

So, back to it! More writing, but most of it won't be at this blog. My goal is once a week here. Why so little? Because I've got a lot of catching up to do. I've got some writing that needs finishing up for Raggi (which should be a fun treat for those of you who have enjoyed what you've read here) plus damn near everything I mentioned last year.

And yes, I will be retuning to the my series on hex-mapping. There's still a lot to say there, including some reflections on earlier bits in the series.

The good news is that it's all fun. I'd love to be finished with it, sure, but I'm looking forward to spending time on it all as well.

Wish me luck!