Here’s a pair of questions I have been pondering: why don’t I make keyed hexcrawls for wilderness travel in my home game, and which published hexcrawls have I liked and why (hint: they rhyme with “Black Burn of Blandonsford” and “Irate Worg seecrawls”)? This post is inspired by the Map Blogwagon, a gauntlet thrown down by the Prismatic Wasteland blog that we all come up with something to say about maps in less than 80 days. Well, it only took me 79!
Let’s get to it: the reasons I don’t make my own hexcrawls (hint: it’s because I make hexframes, which I like better).
Hexcrawls are a classic D&D method of handling travel through the wilderness, but they are not as popular as dungeon crawls, for two main reasons. First, folks often feel the narrative loop of a hexcrawl is not as compelling or satisfying as a dungeon crawl. Dungeons have a clearly defined end-goal (“kill the monsters” or “return to town with treasure”) while hexcrawls lack “a clear, default goal to provide strong motivation and a reward structure”. In that post, Justin Alexander states that hexcrawls can be improved by providing clear goals, but I wanted more examples of good hex crawl goals. What works to make hex crawls exciting?
Second, hexcrawls take a lot of work to prep–hours spent designing a landscape of hexes, numbering them, and keying them all with interesting locations (i.e., linking those numbers to descriptions). And much of that prep time is likely to be wasted on unexplored hexes (and the smaller the hex (no matter how cool small hexes are), the more likely a GM will waste time creating unused hexes). Although hexcrawls have their adherents, the prep time requirement is enough to make many GMs throw up their hands and go back to hand-waved travel, pointcrawls, and/or random encounter tables.
Is it possible to solve both of these problems at once? Yes, and that’s by making hexframes, not fully keyed hexmaps. Like many good things, I got this idea from Mythic Bastionland (MB) by Chris McDowall. MB has an efficient system for making hexframes, a made-up term I define here as partially-keyed hexmaps that host one or more clear and compelling challenges that can be solved by the players if they so choose (‘hexgoals’, or ‘hex-situations’). A hexgoal can be a situation players want to engage with, or a situation they want to avoid.
GM-facing map for MB, from here. Red symbols denote the hexgoal Myths and Landmarks (the red lines mark barriers to movement).
Here are the steps in MB. First, roll up a map (cool generator here), placing terrain and major towns/castles. Second, partially key the map: place hexgoals by locating Myths in random hexes. Third, add Landmarks (points of interest, rumor-sources, Seers, challenges) to some hexes. At the end, you end up with many hexes that are essentially unkeyed, relying on random generation. Those unkeyed hexes have great potential to be boring–if you were playing another game.
Because that’s where MB innovates: Myths are hexgoals that interact at a distance–they are the hexframe, in that they affect the entire hex landscape. I call hexgoals that can interact outside their hex “dynamic hexgoals”, and ones that stay in their hex “static hexgoals”. The whole premise of Mythic Bastionland is tied to finding dynamic hexgoals: the Knights all swear an oath to “Seek the Myths” to “Honor the Seers” and “Protect the Realm”. A Myth is usually a threat to the realm of some sort, or a mystical event that needs to be witnessed. Each time you enter a wilderness hex, you have a 50:50 chance to trigger the next sequenced encounter in a Myth story (either one nearby, or a random kingdom Myth). So even unkeyed hexes are regularly interesting and rewarding to visit, advancing player goals!
Now Mythic Bastionland is a capsule game, one with mechanics tightly tied to its aesthetics and gameplay. But is it possible to extend that hexframe-driven play to other games?
Enter the big list of RPG plots by S. John Ross (and thanks to Conghal for helping me remember what I was looking for when I was brainstorming this post on the Prismatic Wasteland discord). This list of plot archetypes is generic across many situations, but many archetypes are described as funneling players into specific locations. However each of them can be quickly adapted to make hexcrawls compelling hexframes, with one or more specific hexgoals for a landscape.
I provide a few examples here, with dynamic hexgoals in red. Let’s go through the RPG plot list up to letter G (please post in the comments if you want me to do them all, there’s a lot): buckle up.
The Big List of RPG Hexcrawl Plots, A-G
Any Old Port in a Storm: The players seek shelter in a landscape that turns out to hide something dangerous, secret, or supernatural. They may be trapped in that landscape (passes snowed in? Injured friend can’t leave their bed? River flooding? Main road is prime hunting ground?).
Hexframes: They must hunt down the danger out there before it gets them, or someone they care about. They must escape by finding an alternate route out, or get others to safety, or lure it away.
Hexgoals: Signs of the danger, the lair of the danger, ambush raids from the danger, places holding rumors and secrets of the danger, favorable terrain to face the danger, the way out.
Better Late than Never: The party gives chase to bad guys, through unknown or dangerous terrain. Bad guys can lure players into dangerous places, set ambushes and traps, and/or escape if they get across a certain line. Locals may not be friendly.
Hexframes: Catch the bad guys, and don’t die or get caught in turn. If they split up, choose which ones to chase (a hard choice with only bad options).
Hexgoals: Marks on the trail they are following, elevated terrain for looking ahead, vulnerable or hidden spots for ambushes (river crossings, rough terrain, the main roads), smuggler routes and short cuts, a dangerous swamp or hidden cliff, angry local villages, the border.
Blackmail: A villain blackmails the party into doing their dirty work for him: traveling through a hex landscape. For exactly what must be done, see other plots.
Hexframes: Do the villain’s bidding, and either survive or limit the damage–not both. Find other blackmailed locals willing to help you.
Hexgoals: Oppressed villages, oases and refuges amid punishing conditions, places holding rumors and secrets of the blackmailer. Varied, depending on hexframe specifics.
Breaking and Entering: The party must nab (or sabotage, or assassinate) an object or a person from a secure location, arriving and then escaping through a difficult hex landscape.
Hexframes: Get in, get out alive/undetected/unharmed. Evade or destroy pursuers, circumvent security, acquire or suffer from local terrain knowledge.
Hexgoals: Points of lost access (destroyed bridges, road patrols), secret tunnels, places to spy the target, local village informants, magic ritual sites and active security spell, fortified locations, watchtowers.
Capture the Flag: The party must storm one or more military targets scattered across a hex landscape.
Hexframes: Take all the strongpoints (sequentially, or at the same time), take most of them, hold them for a set time. Muster local forces for the attack, locate mysterious allies, avoid enemy forces, gather intelligence, or avoid bystanders.
Hexgoals: Strongpoint locations, local patrol routes, settlements, smuggler routes, hidden entrances, vegetation for cover, hidden allies and enemies.
Clearing the Hex Landscape: The party must clear out a land where bad things live.
Hexframes: Establish a stronghold by clearing out monsters, protect settlements from mobile threats, gather bounties for bad things, purify and sanctify land against evil curses or hordes, find ways to pacify angry land-spirits, wrangle the land itself into order via map magic or rituals.
Hexgoals: Monster lairs, enemy settlements, trails and signs of monsters, raid sites, points and ecosystems of magical power, settlements to protect, hidden allies and enemies, rival groups of enemies, places of wisdom to learn solutions.
Delver's Delight: Treasure-hunting, set in a dangerous hex landscape. Dungeon-crawling, panning for gold, poaching, trespassing.
Hexframes: Deal with myriad local threats while looking for fixed or mobile treasure (animal parts, magic?). X marks the spot, but getting there isn’t easy. Travel is safe only in certain areas (e.g. no lightning-trees) or at certain times: narrow natural tunnels and barriers. Plunder obvious or hidden microdungeons (i.e., dungeon rooms) set in a broader perilous landscape.
Hexgoals: Dungeon sites, places of refuge and/or danger, fast-travel via rivers, signs of nearby dungeons or magic, landmarks on a treasure map.
Don't Eat the Purple Ones: Stranded, survive a hostile land, then get back home.
Hexframes: Find food/water/shelter/monster repellant before you succumb to storms/monsters/poison/bad good/the locals. Learn about the strange flora and fauna to survive your teleport-gone-wrong. Figure out how to fix the broken land. Hide until help arrives.
Hexgoals: Refuges, natural or magical hazards, monster hunting grounds, places with clean food and/or water, un/friendly locals.
Elementary, My Dear Watson: Solve a mystery, search out clues hidden in hexes.
Hexframes: Find hiding witnesses across a network of villages. Search out evidence that the raiders are a false-flag operation.
Hexgoals: Hidden settlements, cabins in the woods, old raid locations, relatives of the murderer.
Escort Service: Go on a journey through a hex landscape to get your valuable object/person to a safe spot.
Hexframes: Rival factions are watching the main routes: avoid detection as long as possible. Your Macguffin is trackable, stay in cover/water/earth often.
Hexgoals: Hidden paths, caves, or trusty locals. Friendly guard patrol areas.
Good Housekeeping: Thrust into command of a large organization, you must keep the landscape it controls running smoothly.
Hexframes: Keep the serf farmers in line, and safe from bulettes. Manage the magical barony through its weekly dose of near-disasters.
Hexgoals: Hotspots of trouble, magical nexuses, floods, hidden rebel meetings.
Whew, okay are my fingers tired. I saw some published hexcrawl-based adventures in those RPG plot prompts, for sure. Many published short adventures that include hexcrawls have specific hexframes in mind, sometimes even lists of events that happen without PC intervention, because hexframes provide tense motivators that make an adventure memorable. And Mythic Bastionland? That’s RPG plot #25, “Quest for the Sparkly Hoozits”--a hexframe where you search for MacGuffins (Myths), with dynamic hexgoals that can act all over the map.
Using hexframes instead of fully keyed hexmaps, and a combination of static and dynamic hexgoals, one can make compelling and rewarding hexcrawls that can be prepped in a fraction of the time as a traditional hexcrawl. Don't prep plots, don't prep hexcrawls: prep hexframes.
An example hexframe
The lovely illustration below is by Amanda Lee Franck, and the PW Map challenge says I am supposed to do something with it. Well, it clearly has a hexgoal in it (that wonderful owl-human-lizard head statue), so let’s talk about the surrounding landscape's hexframe: Capture the Flag.
“Stop belly-aching Jori, all citizens come up here every year despite the danger. We don’t run back down tails between our legs, we pilgrimage on up to the Statue like proud members of the Crack. And I don’t wanna hear any more whining about it or you will have the rough side of your momma’s hand when we get back, so help me I will blab like a rat to her.
Now it’s your first trip Up, I get that, but the sunlight won’t kill ya. The wizards and the dragons and the monsters, now, they WOULD kill ya if we didn’t have the Statue. You know it’s the whole reason we Crack-folk survive in this crazy world, and why we retreated down there. Right? Oh come on, didn’t you learn nothing about the Statue?
Here’s the deal. Ain’t no magic allowed near it, see, and the monsters get the cramps awful bad, the magic curdling in their guts like overripe snails. It’s ancient tech, some gizmo from long ago, still sparking. What are you asking now? Why we have walls around the Statue, if it’s so safe? Well, I will answer that as it is a refreshingly good question after the past ten minutes of your blabbering.
We have those walls to keep out the Strangers from the other toeholds of the Folk, the other places with Statues of their own. Same reason we made replica heads, to slow down their raids on our Statue. Yep, from other Cracks, I guess, I never seen em. But we keep their blimps from landing, and we keep their troops from taking our Statue and making free with its magics.
What magics could they steal? Well, I don’t rightly know, but I heard tell that Outsiders can turn off Statues, for a time, and let the howling waste full of monsters do their work, let them clean out the Crack and gibber in its remains. Then the Statue comes back on, and then those strange Folk can move into our Crack and grow their own society. Can you imagine some dirty human in the Crack?
But here’s the thing Jori, I heard that our high Crack-mucks also know how to turn off Statues, and this year they are picking a team to head over to the nearest Stranger settlements and turn off a few Statues. We need breathing room, we do, and Blorb knows I could use a larger house and not have to worry on the regular about foreign attacks. If we play our cards right, we could be part of that team. I know quite a few curses, and you are not a bad knife man, when you ain’t blubbering about daylight.
Just think about it, okay? If we get lucky, we will see a dragon flying today over our festival. And if we get really lucky, next year, we’ll both be aldermen of New Crack Town!”
–Lemma, candidate for Strike Team Three, 874 PD (fate unknown)
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