Hexcrawl '25 Mid-Year Status

As we pass the mid-point of the year, taking a look at how this Hexcrawl25 challenge is coming along. On a pure stats, it is not bad - 57% of total hex-count for the year achieved with 50% of the time gone. The campaign I have been running as a test-bed and motivator just hit summer hiatus after 17 sessions, 13 within the campaign, 4 open-table stand-alones. So far, so good.

The Hexmap

I started off from a cookie-cut chunk out of my existing Azgaars Fantasy Map Generator world map.

Initial progress followed a bit of a corkscrew workflow -
* I cookie cut the game region from the existing gameworld
* I built a spreadsheet to list off all the sub hexes and then filled in the biome, culture, religion and political data
* I stared at the first hex
* Rolled up some locations with the d30 Sandbox Companion - incl some settlements, lairs, ruins and cults
* Built a little worksheet, accidentally printed off more than I needed, actually useful mistake
* Read the sites in Knock #1, decided where they went
* Stared at the first hex-region some more, wondered why this had felt easier for Southern Reaches
* Looked for my southern reaches notes, took a while to find them
* Looked for the blogpost about what the hell I did back then
* Saw I had worked up the regions with Deck of Worlds, realised I did not feel like hauling that off the shelf
* Poked through my new copy of Tome of Adventure Design, got a few ideas from that, put it back
* Got a post it, listed out a few ideas to then stick wherever I found a home
* Cracked open the southern reaches spreadsheet - stole the NPC trait generator, list of gods, list of regions (same world), bayou encounter table and ancestry table
* Reworked the random ancestry table to make it closer to D&D baseline
* Looked back over my list of locations and assigned inhabitants to the settlements by order of commonality
* I cracked the Deck of Worlds, even threw in the bridging deck for Lore Masters Deck and roughed out the 19 regional super-hexes
* Realised I had gotten my scale wrong, and drilled down into a sub-hexes in a panic the night before running the first session
* Plundered bits of my Southern Reaches campaign that did not get used to populate the 'starting zone'

All that to get me ~ 19 sub-hexes of the starting hex and thematic ideas for the surrounding super-hexes. I eventually settled on 40 mile super-hexes, 10 mile hexes and 2.5 mile sub-hexes.

As of end of June the hexmap stood like this:

The eagle-eyed among you may note that a bunch of extra hexes had to get drawn on around the edges and filled out as the players pin-balled about - so actually I have created some 209 hexes, 66% of what I need, but that 9% difference is outside the super-hex that is the boundary for the challenge. It has been an interesting study in 'what is necessary' for a campaign - all this 'off-hex' adventuring down in the south-east is driven by the PCs deciding they had to rescue an NPC that had vanished while on a quest up a mountain.

Venturing into that particular corner was funny because it was the overlap of A-D-E super-hexes which had high-concepts derived from Deck of Worlds but also none of the same level of faction-hex-scale thinking I had been painstakingly doing for the hexes of A super-hex. That turned into a bit of a speed-run of the processes I had been previously using which was helpful to get fluent with them.

Round-up of Hexcrawl25 posts

First block is spin-up and winging-it with taking on the challenge and spinning up the dual-mode campaign, then testing the overloaded encounter dice as the core mechanic and instances of having to fill sub-hexes on the fly as players wandered around.

For tools I used Azgaars Fantasy Map and Hex Kit.

For within-hex detail I settled on the faction/inhabitants based approach combined with bleed-over from neighbours.

For the broader super-hex/regional trends I tried a broad-brush approach, an iterative broad-then-narrow approach and Brian Yaksha's hexfill method - all helpful to get hexes filled in their own parts of the map; better or worse depending on how much detail was already laid down.

Lastly, due to player demand I cooked up a regional carousing table.

Carrying on Hexcrawlin' in 25

All told I have been enjoying the challenge - the hexflower frames that Maatlock provided gave just the right amount of structure for me - 19 sub-hexes of detail within a 'faction hex' seems to be working pretty well. I have not been orderly or focused in my populating of hexes, it has been very needs driven but that has been no hindrance so far.

Between travel and other committments over the next months we have a six week hiatus, I shall be picking things up again then. I shall probably not be trying to get ahead of my hexes in that time, filling things in close enough in time to when it gets used seems to be a motivator for me so I shall carry on doing that.