High-speed hex-crawling - exploring with flyers

There are lots of good resources out there for the basics of hex-crawling. Do they still work when your players get a sudden boost of mobility?

In my case it was a flying skiff, perhaps it is seven-league boots, winged steeds, some sort of astral coach - anything that allows them to rapidly traverse the landscape. Note, this is not about 'point-to-point' things like teleports or portals, for those you can just use standard hex-crawl before and after the 'jump'.

In my home game the players assembled a flying skiff out of a number of things and set off into the north west of their realms on a quest. The practical challenge here is that at any significant height, visibility ranges are greatly extended so in theory the players can see everything in all the hexes around them. From own experience with light aircraft, yes, big terrain features can be broadly identified and you can rapidly get a sense of where those mountains, that desert, the coast is. But rivers can be hard to track and you can rapidly lose sight of anything smaller than a large metro area. Unless the party is taking the time to travel for optimum reconnaissance, I would say what they spot is tied to what they happen to cross over, through or by.

Practically this means you can retain a relatively low 'thing per hex' set up and it makes sense.

How it played out at my table: I had been running with medium grain 10km / 6 mile hexes with a major feature per hex. For 80% of the campaign, the adventure was happening in a single city (one hex) with occassional jaunts into extra-planar spaces and with lots of points of interest densely concentrated. We were getting ~1/2 day of activity done per sessions.

Once the flying skiff was created the players set off, flying by daylight, and covering up to 16 hexes per day in the short winter days before sun down and loss of visibility stopped travel. They then switched to spending 2 days travelling per session - which lead to a huge increase in content covered.

Hexed map of campaign region, from Azgaars Fantasy Map Generator

The way I ran things was with hourly (every 2 hexes) navigation checks and an encounter roll. For these aerial encounters - 1/20 of something dangerous, 3/20 spot something interesting on the ground, 16/20 just the terrain going past. The flying skiff had a good top speed - not much beyond young dragons, diving griffons or giant-flung rocks were going to be able to catch up. Similarly, the terrain was mountainous, with lots of occluded sight-lines making it very possible to pass near a thing without seeing it.

The highest concentration of encounters was when the party followed a trail instead of going by compass direction and found most of the settlements and way-points along that trail. The biggest difference to standard hex-crawl is that the party has much more choice to engage or not with the features they find. I had three encounter tables behind my screen for all this - aerial, fixed site and mobile factions. There were a couple of known places, hexes where the party knew a thing should be there, so the encounter roll was a question of whether they stumbled upon it at first go or needed to spend some time to search. Outside of those locations, I flipped between the static sites and mobile factions depending on time of day and proximity to other things and that seemed to work well enough.

What this means is that you can traverse '1 thing per hex' maps at speed and altitude and it still makes sense.

The navigation check also leads to some great fun - I had an hex-gridded map of the region on the player side of my screen matching to the large-scale maps they had access to before they set out. I had my own marked up version behind the screen. A failed navigation check put some scatter onto the hexes they were progressing through - a mountain in the way, cloud-cover or other factor letting them end up not quite where they wanted to be.

One thing that came apparent, compared to standard hex-crawls, is that with speed and ease of motion things can go much more wrong, much more quickly. On setting out for one day, the party made a mistake in which of a line of border forts the one they had slept at was and set off in the correct direction, from the wrong starting point. A fluffed first nav check meant they were four hexes over the border into the hostile neighbouring realm and very far off their intended course by the time they caught it.

I had been concerned that greater speed would lead to much, much higher need for content in the hexes but it turned out not to be so; large distances were crossed with multiple things noted in passing but only a few key locations were interacted with - on par to a standard session.