Setup - where the adventure came from
The party was trying to evacuate a large column of freed prisoners through a swamp. The below is very much the 'DM-screen view' version of a session report.
I printed the sites, encounters and flavour elements I had worked up previously on a single page, double column, minimal borders, switching around the order of the tables so they broke cleanly at the bottom of the page. This gave me everything at a single glance.
I used an overloaded encounter die so there were both 'encounter, positive' and 'encounter, negative' possibilities plus 'locality' and 'percept' options. Fatigue and expiry results did not require anything from these tables.
1. Setback
2. Fatigue/delay
3. Expiration
4. Locality
5. Percept
6. Advantage
Session Report: Yaksha's Hexfill Method for the Marsh That Remembers An initial portion of the session was on the escarpment where individual sub-hexes are keyed, in classic style. There was a significant amount of play avoiding huge dinosaurs and giant toads.
Use of this hexfill method started once the party descended the great cliff at the tar lifts and reunited with the refugee column. Their goal was to make a run north-west across the swamp to friendly terrain.
The first hex the moved off to they rolled a 4 (locality) so then I had them roll a d20 on the 'scene-setting/sites' - find a stuck caravan - and then they rolled a d6 on Big Jobs to see what the caravan was carrying - turns out recovered loot from the recent invasion. There was some too-and-fro as the soldiers guarding the caravan and the party dicker over help to unstick it and meanwhile the refugees camp up at a local high ground under a big red-bloomed tree. The party all gets a miscellaneous bag of muddy loot - everything too filthy to give much guidance on worth.
At this point the party had hiked through the night to catch up with the column, many of the freed prisoners had been up a long time since they were an early group down the cliff-side winches - so it was decided to camp out under the tree (taking a long rest).
We rolled the encounter die per 3-hours of remaining in place; getting 6 (advantage), 6 again and 3 (expiration). For both advantage results I had the players roll me d10+d4 on the encounter table, then figured out how it went their way not against them.
6 - rival adventurers, archetype hereos - this was a quintet of orcs - a greatsword wielding fighter, a wizard, a cleric of bahamut, a ranger and a rogue - the last two being hard to tell apart archer-types. They came upon this camp full of refugees and offered to delay their cockatrice hunt to help guide these people home for a token payment.
6 - terror bird - here a great hissing and crashing out in the swamp was revealed to be a very large heron-like bird catching and consuming the cockatrice
3 - expiration - this marked the greater group hitting zero rations - even after the orcs sharing what they had. The group had not much to start, had foraged the locality and were now going hungry.
At this point daylight was nearly gone so despite being well rested, the group decided to sit tight to the following dawn rather than thrash around the swamp in the dark with hungry, weakened refugees in tow. Waiting out the night they rolled 5 (Percept), 2 (exhaustion), 3 (expiration), 5 (Percept).
5 - saved drowning man (rolled a d6 on Bounties, to give them an insight into 'what things happen around here') and turned into party herbalist stumbling onto someone who had gotten lost and was drowning.
2 - fatigue - terror bird returned to stalk the perimeter - I had this be the terror bird coming back to see if there were any easy pickings - would have disrupted any rest but was manageable as they were just waiting.
3 - expiration - hunger really starting to bite - with approx 250 escapees in tow and no supplies.
5 - gnome tinkers (another d6 roll on Bounties got 'travellers escort') and so got a group of gnome stilt walkers and wading bird riders, tinkers on their way to the border forts for work - who were amenable to trading news in return for the location of a nearby fishing village
Setting off, the party chose to skirt the cliff and rolled a 4 (locality) for the new hex. This was an instance of bringing up a keyed location on the map because it referred by to the highlands - these were the sacrifice pits - trees festooned with corpses flung from above. After a cursory investigation, the party and their wards passed on
The next hex brought them to the village they sought - I missed noting the roll for this one - the boarling fisherfolk were bargained with for supplies - both food for now and for the road. They also sought news of surroundings - getting a sense that all ways ahead involved dealing with various local dwellers - from arrogant tabaxi to the harpy coven. They were councilled to head onwards and avoid the nearby sunken tower.
So they went to the sunken tower - I believe the roll was a 4 (locality) - here they figured this was a place trapped against passage of large groups as they had been warned of by the soldiers with the stuck wagon. Leaving the slow guiding of their rescuees to the orc adventurers and other hangers-on, they decided to delve into the tower.
This was one I had to wing on the fly, in no way my best work. We were running up on hour five and one of the players was approaching when they had to leave so I modelled it on an Irish Round Tower - not much at the bottom, rooms at the top - mostly empty with lots of things tossed around. A few luck rolls gave a sense of what they could glean - lenses from rusted telescopes, books both waterlogged and preserved and some armfuls of noble clothes. Very lucky group athletics checks with multiple nat-20s allowed them to both get in and out of the submerged hatch without letting the swamp completely flood the place.
Session report ends
Where they entered a new location, it worked fine - either from the Encounters or from the Scene Setting lists. It got a bit squeaky when they had to do a couple of long-hauls in place - unsticking a caravan, camping until daylight on a dry bit - instances where there were multiple encounter checks happening because the column was remaining in place (and being large and noticeable). For negative stuff, no problem, an encounter happens upon them, but I fumbled the 'percept' and 'locality' bits - reaching for the bounties and jobs tables and tweaking those on the fly into 'things that happen in camp'.
What I should probably have done is just go with another 'scene setting' roll and declare that something else that became revealed or was found as the group hung around noting that a hex is large and not everything is obvious at once. My lack of familiarity with the tool rather than anything wrong with the tool and certainly I would be happy to take the same lists back to the table for the next session and just use them better.
All in all it was a great tool to support hex-crawling, as good as anything else I have come across with all the little tables providing a nice set of angles to catch almost any circumstance. The only places I felt things squeaked was when the players ... just were players and decided to go poke around the sunken tower that I just did not have anything prepped for. I was sure I had a roughed out tower in my binder but no. Something to fix in a spare 20 mins.
Good tool, can recommend.
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