Campaign Spin-Up IX - Dual-Mode Hex-Crawl (Continuous Campaign/Episodic)

I stood up a campaign to test and drive my #Hexcrawl25 challenge that had been intended to operate in two modes:
* Classic continuous campaign
* Episodic open table

The time and venue is the Friday night open table sessions I play at - historically I offered an open-table (Brancalonia, Spelljammer Academy) but I wanted to try and mix in something more persistent with returning players. The deliberate aspects of this campaign were:
- dual mode - A-team / open table on alternating weeks
- follow the players, drop hooks but no big plot
- toy deployment - use the shelves of books
- newbie friendly

I decided to run the campaign part on a biweekly basis and on the off-week run one-shots. Both will use the common starting villlage of the hexmap.

Primary campaign

The map got started using the #hexcrawl25 challenge. To figure out how the 'long-haul' campaign wanted to playe within it I held a session zero to find out what the players wanted. I threw a couple of elements of background to them - a back-water region, recently upset by a significant invasion of one neighbour into another with all the disruption that entails.

I then asked:
1. Why is group together: displaced people of various sorts banding together
2. Tone of the game: standard D&D tone (neither grimdark nor slapstick)
3. Character creation + first impressions: initial character concepts were aired and a theme of 'magic users that do not understand their powers' emerged - the warlock that thinks they are a sorcerer, the sorcerer that thinks they are just lucky, etc.
4. Elements to emphasise, elements to avoid: exploration and freedom to poke about came up, no specific themes to avoid.

The key bits for set up from my point of view were a wish to be based in a tavern on a trade route but relatively out in the wilderness, with an overall theme of 'realm building'. At the end of session zero they had wandered into the 'starter village' established a base of operations and investigated a troublesome cult - nicely setting things up for kick-off.

Together this gave me plenty to work with - we locked in on the campaign start point and then I zoomed out and blocked out the local region (using Deck of Worlds for this).

I use the overloaded encounter dice for the hex-crawl mechanic - on entering a new hex or spending a chunk of time exploring - and it worked pretty well. So far between hunting and spending recovered treasures, supplies have not been much of a factor.

Dropping some landmarks on the map and getting a grip on who are the general groups/factions dwelling around the place has given enough of a skeleton to allow me to improvise whenever they have lit out for the horizon in an unexpected direction - more on that in Hex-filling by wandering around and Forgetting Your Notes And Hexcrawling Anyway

Initially a six session mini-campaign, the players have decided to press on at the same tempo. When asked were there any changes they wanted to make, all suggestions were on the player side - better note taking, better map creation. As a DM, I am well satisfied with that.

Open-table one-shot games

For the off-weeks, of which there have been less than expected due to work or other committements, I have been using OSE adventures as the spine for each session, situating them within the hex-map. So far I have dropped in Winters Daughter and The Waking of Willoughby Hall; both of which worked fine.

Using the hex-crawling map and overloaded encounter dice mechanic gave the travel too and from the location a bit of heft that I often handwave otherwise; without having a hexmap to point to, it feels like throwing an obstacle or encounters into journeys is purely a choice of mine - when I let the overloaded encounter die define whether or not the journey is smooth, I feel a lot more justified in bad things happening when they do.

I have had consequences from the one-shots turn up in the campaign sessions - in particular the slaying of some of the locals by a one-shot group meant they were up in arms when the campaign party encountered them and have required significant de-escalation but also alliance building.

Preliminary View

Overall it seems to be working as a model - the campaign mode is giving me the persistent world and *actual* consequences that I enjoy. The players looking to take notes and recall what is going on I see as a good sign.

I am happy that dropping in one-shots seems to be sustainable in that they are causing impacts but not huge problems for the campaign game.