Realm of the Reluctant King (Hexcrawl25), 28 Sessions (Jan 2025-May 2026)
What it was:
Actually a dual-mode campaign with persistent campaign and one-shot open tables running on the same map. 83% of sessions were the main campaign so we shall focus on that here. I will continue to use this as an easy frame for running one-shots.
- An experiment in bringing an old-school techniques to a typically '5e/Trad/one-shots' crowd.
- Pitched as a classic campaign testing a hexcrawl/west marches model where the players tell me what they want to do of a session.
- Running 5e but with old-school XP accrual - treasure recovery, monsters slain (or overcome/avoided), treasure squandered through carousing, hexes explored.
- Run when we had any three players; sometimes allowing a 'ride-along' open-table player
For completeness, the six adventures used for standalones in parallel were:
Waking of Willoughby Hall
Winters Daughter
Hole In The Oak
Home Reforged
Old Man Katan & Mushroom Band
Splinters: Land of the Dead
What worked:
- Initially a six-week short cycle to test the concept which then continued for a year and a bit by popular demand
- XP accrual worked fairly well - it was way, way slower than players expected compared to the 5e milestone levelling they were used to but I do not think the game suffered. They clawed their way up to level 5 over the course of the campaign. but were then no-where near getting to 6th.
- Players self motivating - they came up with plans, came up with notions, distracted themselves with sidequests and chased after shiny things they saw along the way. Player get-up-and-go was the mainspring that drove the campaign, I just needed to lay the table for them.
- Timeskip - after monkey-wrenching a mysterious artefact in a wizards tower they were flung out of time for 4 and a bit years relatively early in the campaign which was great fodder for interesting campaign world shifts
- Hexcrawling toolkit - the campaign was built explicitly around travel being meaningful, the map being unknown and the players figuring out how to use it. Even with provisions and food being relatively sidelined as a constraint as the swamp was good hunting grounds getting too and from places avoiding known hazards (after finding them through stumbling upon them the first time) was fun
- Picking a table - I made this an invite only campaign, drawing on the folk who had played well as part of the Brancalonia campaign. This pool also provided a ready replacement when we got an open seat. I explicitly picked for a certain vibe and we ran a session zero to lay it all out which worked well.
- Playable henchfolk - for times when the part was split, I ran up simplified NPC cards based of Scarlet Heroes system for those who's characters were 'off camera' to still be able to play. I think it worked a lot better than having folk sit on their hands. Some of those NPCs gained glorious legend, others infamy, only one died.
- Play with three - as long as we had three of the roster of six, we ran - practically it was five since one player was rarely available. This was handled variably - sometimes getting the party back together was a thing, sometimes it was hand-waved along the lines of 'they were looking after the end of the caravan' depending on circumstances. It worked in the sense we always got a game in if we had at least three.
What didn't:
- Players were not good at steering the party back together once split. These splits were across sessions - A,B,C were at one week, C, D, E at the next. They kept leaving each other wrong information - "we are going north west to the camp" and then getting distracted and heading away to the east. They did this to themselves, until it became a gag about how the instructions they left for themselves were always wrong. This lead to D and E setting off to find the others, on wrong information, with C driving an NPC. Credit to the players that they did not meta-game and just worked on the (bad) in-game information to see how the chips fell.
- Coherence - letting the players completely have their own head driving events combined with variable player presence session after session sometimes had things get very strange indeed - why are people up here, because we all came when someone wanted to do a thing, but now they are away and so the rest are just winging it and poking at hazards until inspiration strikes and they head off in another direction. It could be very hard to prep for that and not necessarily my best work having to run unexpected parts of the map when it had been agreed to go elsewhere before. I know some schools of 'the DM is a player too' would have put the foot down and insisted they do what they said they would do but I am of the 'never let them see you bleed' omniscient DM school so wherever they went, they found world (of variable quality) waiting.
- Downtime - after the success of the timeskip, most of the table wanted to put in a block of downtime after pulling off one big rescue but one player proceeded to hare off across the map that collapsed the chance for the rest. They never got back to it and were trotting too and fro until the end of the campaign.
- Getting ghosted - one of the players, who had explicitly asked at my open tables to join any campaign I ever ran that let them dig into the world, ghosted us after five sessions. Weirdly it made sense in-game because they tripped and interaction with an ancient idol... but instead of ever turning up to hear how that went, we just had them knocked into a coma, then mystic stasis. Any excuse or notification not to expect them would have been find but to just ghost an RL game? Rude.
- Scheduling was sometimes a bit trickier - it was always on the Friday night slots but in fairly short order we ended up with juggling because people were in other campaigns, there were vacations and there was some shuffling. Actually, I am going to call this neutral, we still got the sessions in, more to say that even planning a regular 'friday night, every second week' seemed to require twiddling and calendar management.
Lessons learned:
- Set deadlines: I would set more clocks or some kind of plot to focus the action - players chasing down their shopping list of odds and ends became a little too unstructured for me towards the end. Given this was a time-boxed campaign - a year of sessions running up to a hard stop (the arrival of smallest householder) that served to focus player effort and keep things moving. In the absence of a similar defined end point, I would want something else driving in-world tensions.
- Make down time happen: I should have leaned harder on downtime happening, even where one player wanted to run off and do things. Time passing during downtime is so useful to have things mature and evolve I should have pushed to have it happen more.
- Tweak the overloaded encounter die for mid-results. I think this merits a more detailed unpacking but I found some of the results difficult to implement in an interesting way time and again; I need to go back over all the various takes and steal a slightly different set of ideas.
- In picking my table, I accidentally gutted the DM panel for the Friday nights, oops. In future I'll be more careful about that - we had multiple nights over the year where no other tables ran because the DMs were playing at mine. Was not a bad impact for the campaign but not great for the games society as a whole.
- Pet collecting potential could have been leaned into more and the players would have been down for it.
Stats:
What did I track
Treasure recovered
Hexes Explored
Carousing XP
Vanquished Foes (full XP)
Bypassed Foes (half XP)
This post is already long, I will do a proper stats breakdown another time.
Wrap Up
Overall I would call this campaign a success - I tried out a wholly new style; stuck with hexmap bashing throughout the campaign, maintained rigorous use of systems - overloaded encounter dice, XP progression. I learned a few things along the way, especially about hexmaps and using them in anger regularly. I enjoyed dropping in and then playing through the dungeons of Knock #1 - seeing how much adventure could be wrung out of not that many rooms.
I think the players got something out of trying this fairly unusual style of game (unusual for the general population of 5e players). Regular encounter rolls, a completely open sandbox to flail around in, the old-school approach of encounters not being balanced and running the hell away being a valid choice. Their progress being tied to the risks they took was also novel - some sessions with a great deal of faff and shopping led to very little XP gain; others where they tore down cults and slew great beasts drove great XP gains.
For me, it was a vehicle to test hexcrawling and motivate me to complete the Hexcrawl25 challenge - in this aspect, a smashing success. It also generated a raft of ridiculous tales that players are happy to tell so I will take that as a win too. We managed to cover off most of the big to-do's on everyones list and land a fairly neat finale so while there were things that could have gone better, I think I'm going to chalk this one up as a victory.
The campaign folder can stay on the shelf as a 'base village' for one-shots I run in future, if I stick with this flavour.
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