I needed to rustle up some off-map hexes that were immediately behind a target site for the players and ktrey launched the 'expanded' version so I decided to give it a whirl. I was running using the Hexcrawl25 set up - 19 sub-hexes within the hex - which for me were 2.5 mile sub-hexes and a 10 mile hex. I am not sure who that relates to the intended density of stuff ktrey had in mind but sticking one main thing in each sub-hex and then teasing out the implications worked pretty well.
The specific hex I was looking at was D8 on the map below (lower left) and I knew a few things about it - that it was the north-west facing entrance to a valley running to the south east, that the terrain was rainforest.
I knew the north-east overlapping hex was occupied by the castle of an infernalist warlord, everything else was open so I rolled up something for each sub-hex. After each roll I popped the suggested linked list elsewhere on d4 Caltrops and refined whatever it was there. This gave me a lot of relatively general things but as I kept going, slowly a pattern emerged - there was a fey-bunch at the eastern side of the hex, something else laired at the west with ambush encounters around it. There were tracks and another lair in the centre and a line of impassible terrain cutting north-east to south-west in the south-east corner.
My main reason for working up the hex and running this exercise was to answer 'what was keeping the infernalist busy?' The fey presense provided part of that answer but what was the other faction/force in the hex? I needed something that was opposed to both the fey and the infernal forces so an aberation fits the bill - given this is a nice damp rainforest, an aboleth works.
I tagged the things I had rolled up to those groups then marked them all out on the hexmap to see patterns - colour-coding the things that seemed to fit together. What appears to emerge is a rainforest with a number of dangerous features within it, an aboleth with thralls at their command an fey that are enchanting the rain-forest to be hostile to try and keep them out.
The huge range of odd things that dropped out of the tables on d4 Caltrops provided tons of interesting little hooks and bits to assemble into an emergent narrative of what is happening in the hex. Not all of them immediately link to that core conflict, which is even better - this is the kind of rut-busting I need when I am doing these things, otherwise I ended up getting too focused and everything ties back to the one big thing going on. Variety is better.
Once this was complete, the mess on their doorstep points to why the infernalists have been unable to fully exert control over their surrounds - and speaks to what their objectives will be when the players turn up on their doorstep. A few things have not been fully hammered out at this point but I will wait for the players to actually get down this direction before applying that last level of polish.
The first layer "Wilderness Stocking - Expanded" table is pretty good, a nice, useable example of the craft. What elevates it to seriously good stuff is the huge depth of additional tables scattered across d4 Caltrops that are pulled together in the links, those make this really useful, driving it down to that next level of detail where the creative juices start to really flow.
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