Actual Test: d4 Caltrops Wilderness Stocking - Expanded

tl;dr: tested out d4 Caltrops Wilderness Stocking - Expanded - good in itself but elevated to great by the vast library of supporting tables for every circumstance.

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.

Hexcrawl '25 Retrospective

tl;dr: finalising my hexcrawl25 run; I enjoyed it a lot, this more structured full-year challenge suited me.

For Hexcrawl25, taking the challenge on I settled on the whole super-hex = 40-mile, hexes are 10-mile, sub-hexes 2.5 mile as my working scale. 10-mile was my restriction as that is what all my existing campaign stuff was done in. I cookie-cut a chunk out of an existing block of the world that exists from Azgaars Fantasy Map Generator and initially dropped a 40-mile grid on it.

This turned out to be *way* too large so the rest of the effort was done using just 'super-hex' A for the challenge - and indeed the campaign I ran.

I used the existing culture, religion, nation and biome maps and then zoomed down on those to generate the many sub-hexes within super-hex A.

Last Mile

Pressure-points for domain-level faction (GLoGmas 25 for Dom)

I got Dom of 'Infernal Pact' for GLoGmas; taking their own understanding of it as "writing something inspired by [someones blogpost] I think" I found something inspiring tucked on the back of their "adding in domain play after the fact" posts (parts 1 and 2).

The conclusions on Infernal Pact - that adding in a 'Domain play' layer has benefits and you can do that by thinking about factions - had a couple of questions that boil down to a checklist for gameable domain-scale factions:
- what factions?
- what resources are they using, where are their military assets deployed
- what are they worrying about?
- where are their weak-spots for a group of ne'er-do-wells to cause maximum damage

You can combine this with lots of other generators to help create the faction but you then need to confirm that you have those points of interaction clear as those are the handles on which the players will grab. Even if you do not nail them down to the map using An Echo, Resounding or Birthright or similar, you can get a good sense of who and what is in play.

This is also a good tool to re-tension a setting after maybe players have been off doing things for a while, checking who remains active, who may have been harmed or helped by the players actions and taking it from there. After the players have been in action for a while, they will have attention of some factions, have moved away from the spheres of concern of others, so an exercise like this is good for a mid-campaign check for where the adventures ahead might lie.

Another really good point made is how to see PC's - as a powerful asset across most of the spectrum who is much quicker than most other domain level actors - so they can stick their fingers in a lot of pies and put their thumbs on lots of scales.

Test Case

Using my Hexcrawl25 campaign as a template, let us run the slide-rule over that. I have been using 'dweller faction' as the hook for each hex, so let us see if these can be batched up along the lines of who gets

First we have some distant, stronger actors influencing the locality through a small fraction of their force, and then groups with local strength; the list below is first three 'big, far' factions and then three locals:
- the loyalist goliaths of the Hissing Valley
- the kirianshalee goliaths of the Meandering Mountains
- marchlords
- goblins
- nascent kingdom of Ashley
- harpy coven and their swamp-magician allies

The two goliath groups are head-to-head with each other and the Kingdom of Ashley is the players own faction so the three players in the region that are 'rivals/threats' are the goblins, the harpy coven and the marchlords.

Looking at these three big and small factions as a test of the Dom's questions;

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:

Space & Subaquatics - Setting for Summer Legojam #2

An entry for the the second Summer LEGO RPG Jam created by DIY & Dragons. If you want to have a go - here are the curated helpful links we were given.

Inspired by the planetary hexmap by Riles we have here an aqua planet with space-factions, deep-sea mines and aquatic residents. This is the 'get it out the door' ashcan, as baked as I can get it with time constraints of travel. List of things I would have improved in the land of infinite time at the bottom.

The Planet
Humans have come to Planet 44E chasing rich metal nodules on the floor of the planet-spanning ocean. The colonists arrived and have been busy, regularly buying in shipments of gear paid in hard galactic currency but only a trickle of export product is leaving - the miners are close-lipped about their route.

White Corp is losing its mind as their investments hemorrhage cash and point the finger at the Black Coalition presence - they must be smuggling! Avoiding export taxes! Blue Navy has been called in but are failing to find any such regular smuggling run despite significant armed and stealthed Black Coalition transport capability. Things appear stale-mated, with a lot of fuel burnt and sensor sweeps. Ripe terrain for some enterprising mercenaries.

The Hex Key

Clear day sightlines (or, 6 mile hexes are large)

From a recent wander up a local high point, it was a clear day and I got a photo with a number of readily identifiable local landmarks. It serves as a nice illustration of how far one might see tall things and how long sight lines could be on a clear day.

The two grim things for DMs running hex-crawls - you can fit a hell of a lot of stuff into a single six mile hex and you can see the tall things in a lot of those hexes on a clear day.

Our start point is the star - the start of a walk down a trail which is in the city limits. The four easily identifiable things we can spot because of their tall bits are - the local train depot, the church in the graveyard, the smoke-stacks on the refinery and the control tower at the airport. Far beyond, I think that mountain is the next country over but that one is only 90% certain. The height of these things is the number in brackets.

The interesting thing here is we have a good lot of full grown trees for comparison - I figure most of those are ~60 ft trees, in proper fantasy game forests of a Europe-like place those could be twice as high in ideal old-growth conditions so site A and possibly B would be obscured in those conditions.

Accordion Method Hex-filling (Hexcrawl25)

A daft name for the process I have been following of zooming back out to super-hexes pick up broader threads and presences about the map before zooming back in to populate sub-hexes.

So far I am operating at three scales - 40 mile super hexes, 10 mile hexes and 2.5 mile sub-hexes - this is partly due to a very old screw up in my mapping and lots of sunk cost. Use 3, 12 and 48 if you are doing this from scratch; it will mesh better with what most folk do.

My last write up was about zooming out to the neighbouring super-hexes because my party were dashing for the edges of their starting super-hex and I wanted to figure out what was likely to be found in bleed-over at the edges. It turned out to be very timely to do it in a systemic way because the next session they turned around and chased a quest they made up for themselves all the way across to the far side of the super-hex and threatened to head off the edge of that - happily I had also worked out what was off those edges.

From being pointed west from the red splotch, they decided to head for the high terrain at the southern edge of the super-hex (yellow tags) so I decided to run another cycle of:
Setting hex themes and factions
Faction hex-sites
Hex-stocking by bleed-over

So here I had hexes AD (Baron), A11 (Rift Ruins), AE (Great Rise), D13 (Hissing Valley Miners), E9 (Jungle Marches) and E2 (Dead Mines) which I expanded a little to get a sense of what might be there.


AD - the Baron, outpost of the regional authority, nominally defending and taxing the mines and metalworkers around
A11 - the rift ruins - a broken open and corrupted insectfolk vault; bad insectfolk to contrast reasonable ones elsewhere
D13 - Hissing Valley Mines - iron mines feeding that super-hexes industry, run by traditionalist goliaths
E2 - the dead mines - undead-using mines run by Kirianshalee worshiping goliaths
E9 - Jungle marshes - border between the two goliath groups; lots of ore caravan raiding
AE - Great Rise - foothills to the mountains east/south east, home to cunning human traders

Each of these got a turn for a set of faction hex-sites for sub-hexes within their hex; each got
home base - a camp, tower, lair, whatever
'field activities' site with them actively doing something
'source of their power' location - herds, plants, etc.
minor outpost where they passively manage something
'goal' site in some other hex

The two goliath groups and the baron I had some notion of what they were up to but the cunning humans of the Great Rise were a bit of a mystery. Pondering on what they might be up to in the middle of a rainforest I decided their thing was birds; hunting them, falconing and making things from feathers.

For their sites I came up with:
Home Base - their overly welcoming raionforest village where they work hard to keep all their neighbours friendly
'field activities' - their eagle-falconing scouts keeping an eye on their surroundings
'source of their power' - feather-weaving artificers
minor outpost - canopy hides in their rainforest for bird-trapping
'goal' site elsewhere - a bird-hunting ground

Then I did a grid of who would bleed-over into where; columns for the 'affected' hex and rows for the neighbour having an influence. Each cell then gave me a sub-hex. It also provided a good frame for 'who of that faction would be found abroad' which was a good prompt for what might be in encounter tables.

For those same humans I figured that their neighbours were
A12 - the shadowed swamps
A11 - the rift ruins
E9 - the Jungle Marches
A5 - Foothills/backcountry
E2 - the Dead Mines
E8 - Plateau Rainforest

These provide another block of things to fill sub-hexes with and then zoom down to the remaining empty sub-hexes.

Asking who all the neighbours are allows us to zoom out for another set of hexes which have been thought about, looking at the terrain, religious and cultural boundaries sparks ideas, factions can be picked and then we can zoom back in and run the cycle again.

I am finding myself more inclined to run this 'accordion' approach without fully populating all the sub-hexes, to leave some room for further ideas to be placed.

d30 dwellings and sites

d30 dwellings and sites

Inspired by scrubbing through old newspapers while recycling.


1. Heritage - an ancient site, falling into ruin, maintained with grueling effort by descendants of the original builders. Inhabitants are a powder-keg of blame and recrimination about how it came to this
2. Tapestry workshop, light-soaking yarns for heat management, also rare magic and soul-absorbing threads made by experts - good for banishing the undead
3. Dwelling set on only high-tide rise above sand-banks; very hard to approach without being observed, unhinged weather mage with a solar obsession and their protective staff; very grand, chic, baking hot. Effort is exhausting
4. Dwelling of trellises, "rooms" are defined gardens, most of the structure is outdoors - lush, humid, full of pollen, scent, insects, lizards and toiling gardners. Very little privacy, cheerfully communal
5. Grand old country lodge being restored - busy work parties, with crafts folk, local laborers, experts.
6. Tower with the gardens surrounding it as a maze of pathways through shallow waterways clogged with lillies and fish - one could with difficulty jump a direct path or simply slog through the knee high water and spoil the plants. Stubby old fortified manor at the centre
7. Geometric tiles and carvings within and without with continual perspective tricks that make movement between rooms disturbing but staying within a room serene. Inhabitants can be observed moving about by memory.
8. Fortified manor with enthusiastic young lord raising new breed of burly cattle - locals are aggravated at the disturbance and interference, cattle are also smarter and keep escaping.
9. Survey team from local nobility attempting to refortify an old castle - have just discovered it is far worse than thought plus infested with monsters, noone wants to go back with the bad news, workers refusing to enter.
10. Half built wizards tower, caught fire, just extinguished, exhausted minions and injured watch-beasts scattered around in hasty triage. Multiple traps were left in unstable state.

Hex-maps and high-mobility magic

My home game got another boost of mobility over this most recent level up with Wind Walk and Teleport. This has lead to a chunky shift in gameplay which makes 'broad shallow' prep the name of the game from here out. I had talked about high-speed hex-crawling before; large distances were crossed with multiple things noted in passing but only a few key locations were interacted with - on par to a standard session - but even higher speeds enables new party approaches.

Previously we have been dealing with ~ 8 hours of flying time at ~ 30mph using the Spelljamming Saddle so 3 x 10mile hexes per hour - as fast as a galloping horse, sustained as long as the pilot can stay awake. Wind Walk gets that up to 60mph, doubling that. The red circle on the map was the previous 'one day' limit of their operations - the second arc is their new limit.

This past session the players were ~ 3 sessions deep into chasing down a particular quest goal - settling their immediate problems, getting their gear and themselves into position and staging to a plateau above their objective. And then they decided to spend the entire session flexing Wind Walk to scout for the location of an enemy stronghold associated with a different 'quest line' so to speak. Both are strands of a potential undead apocalypse, one divine, one arcane - divine had been solidly in focus until they decided to detour and scout the arcane thread.

I had prepped in detail for the divine thread before the session but did have enough of a sense of what the arcane thread was to be able to wing it; most importantly I had done some general region prep on who was likely to be seen during over flights which included foes tied to both strands and I was able to use those. Some previous thought on the timetable of the arcane foes also allowed me to pretty quickly extrapolate what must be found in their stronghold if they are at the point they were in the plan.

Mobility multipliers like teleport and wind walk are interesting to deal with because teleport is manageable - you have to know a place to safely go there so player interest is expressed and either it is a return to a known location or you, the DM, have a chance to ponder what the place is like while they figure out how to get a good enough read to risk teleporting there. High speed flyers are more of a challenge as discussed previously but still they are a somewhat manageable scale; the key is whether or not the location is known. Rapidly travelling to a known place with high level magic - sure - you lose the travel encounters but fine.

Pure speed multipliers like Wind Walk make high speed searching of an area for things known to be around somewhere *on a whim* into a new challenge; with magics like this in the back pocket there is no prep-time because the heroes can just decide, cast the spell and go.

Hexcrawl25 - Hex-filling by wandering around

I launched a short-run (six session) hex-crawl campaign to test-drive some old-school play styles and in parallel #hexcrawl25 crested the horizon - one stone, two birds!

With a session 0.5 and a first proper session under our belts ~ 8 hours play at table - the crew has poked about and found a couple of locations so I thought I would dump those up here.

Locations visited in session one:
The picturesque village of Ashley - mostly humans, all buttoned up by nightfall
The sky-burial grounds, sticking up from the forests. Has a tiny keepers cottage, who also has been found to keep the shrine of She Who Hides From Sight
The farm fields of Ashley
The great climb up to the Uruk high land
The panorama rock, claimed as territory by a cross naga
The standing stone (one large and eight smaller) where a message was left
The old lady of the swamps cottage - herb hung and filled with jarred things. Recently hosted the goblin market in the cave beneath
Dark pools - opaque waters, sticky mud and hard going generally. Used by the tree-whisperers as an ambush site for sacrificial victims
Lily ponds - pools with decent fishing, covered by giant lilies, home to territorial giant otters
The sacrificial rock - with burnt remnants of a tabernacle about it. Trees carved with strange symbols are found nearby

Locations seen
Fungal forest - seen but avoided so far
Dragonborn hamlet
Golian hamlet
Cult lair
Ruined tower

For session two they rounded up some henchlings for help and went back to the cult lair, spending the session dungeon diving.

In the interim between these campaign sessions I ran a pair of stand alone open tables - one doing the Waking of Willoughby Hall and the other doing Winters Daughter, both of which I located on the map. The party doing 'Winters Daughter' murdered some locals and chucked them off a cliff en route to their goal, significantly disturbing the local status quo for the campaign party when they restarted.

Session three they did another big wander - setting off on the journey documented in 'crawling with no notes' - wandering up to one settlement, interacting with the locals and bunking there then treking back down to investigate a missing person then turning around and trekking back again to another settlement and bunking there for the night. This was our most significant to-ing and fro-ing session so far - of course it happened when I did not have my notes in hand.

Locations visited in session three:
tall reed beds where they found a snakefolk patrol
deep marsh pools with a big crocodile
a mosquito filled wetland was one
boggy hills full of territorial but non-dangerous small lizards
ruins being excavated by snakefolk
dragonfolk hamlet in a vale with a shrine to a small god
snakefolk village in the exposed part of insectfolk ruins
barren tor that was found to be part of those same buried ruins but further away

Session four they delved into the depths of a giant ruin beneath that settlement; classic dungeoneering.

So far, half the sessions are spent actively 'hex crawling' exploring new parts of the map - we shall see how / if this pattern holds.

It has served its purpose of getting me way ahead of my #hexcrawl25 tempo with 105 hexes sketched in 61 days. Way ahead but still with the players champing at my heels.

Forgetting Your Notes And Hexcrawling Anyway

Running a hexcrawl campaign and I ended up having to improvise somewhat at the last session because (of course) the players headed off in a completely different direction to what I had thought (and prepped). This is partially inspired by I Cast Light writing on Building An Encounter On The Fly.

It was not a totally blank map, I had put some thought into where they were going but I just had none of those notes with me nor had I the book I had been using as a support otherwise (Knock #1).

I did have some partial scrawls from a previous session prep where I was even less sure what they were going to do and I winged it off those.

Thinking I had done off table (vaguely remembered)
- who the local factions were and what they were up to (6 sub-hex sites mentioned before)
- bleed over from neighbouring hexes
- overall campaign 'what is lurking beneath' premise
- interactions players had had with the faction elsewhere in previous sessions

What I had with me at table
- encounter table
- general terrain properties from Azgaar maps
- some pre-rolled terrain possibilities (d100 terrains from Frog Factory)
- overloaded encounter dice table

So when the players wandered onto less filled out parts of the hexmap I had a couple of irons in the fire to use.

First and most useful was the Landmark/Hidden/Secret framework which let me go 'whatever I roll up that they encounter now, that is not the definitive only thing in this hex' which might seem incredibly obvious to some of you but it stopped me getting paralysed in trying to reconcile whatever might have been 'supposed' to be there and whatever the part encountered now.

Second was the overloaded dice - I use Hexploring by Meandering Banter - because the table is getting used to it now with the 'high good, low bad' general feeling though I do not think they have reverse calculated the exact structure of it. This gave a good 'on ramp' to whatever hex as the first thing done was roll that encounter dice on entry to the hex. This set the 'mood' of either eager anticipation (high) or concern (low) to frame whatever came next.

For low rolls, I had my encounter tables which gave the 'who' was being encountered; that combined with a bit of terrain gave enough to work on, particularly since the players usually tried to talk their way out of any trouble first. We ended up with one patrol encounter in tall reeds that they talked their way past and a big crocodile by a deep pool who tried to grab and drag someone under.

For mid rolls, exhaustion, expiration of rations, I tapped my scant terrain notes for things they ran into - two fatigue rolls led to non-lethal but delaying critters - a mosquito filled wetland was one, a region full of territorial but non-dangerous small lizards was another - an expiration roll revealed that the small lizards had savaged their rations during all the chaos.

The higher rolls - perception boons and advantages - were the trickiest to hammer together on the fly - one percept roll was finding an easy way through a hex that had previously been established as difficult to traverse. Another was spotting a local shrine/gathering spot to discretely talk to some locals, another was arriving on a location. These in theory should have been the rolls where the deeper secrets of a hex would have been revealed - the Hidden/Secret elements but I just did not have them to hand.

Things I missed that I will now be printing for my binder
- terrain table - what bits i had from it saved my bacon
- some more boons and minor treasures to be found scattered about the place
- one-page monster manual

Actual Test: Hex-stocking by bleed-over

Testing out the concept of sub-hex stocking with influences from neighbour hexes for Hexcrawl25, as geas'ed by Phlox.

Each hex has 19 sub-hexes that are at least partially within it - 13 fully and 6 split with a neighbour - say 16 hexes on average to fill. Using the 'bleed-over from neighbours' we get a half dozen sub-hexes influences from without the hex. From the 'faction sites' we get four within the hex, one without - the one without can be one of the 'bleed over locations in a neighbour hex. All told this gives us 10/16 hexes explained.

Hex-stocking by transfer/bleed-over

tl;dr: populate sub-hexes with things linking to neighbouring hexes

I am working through HexCrawl25 but this could work for any hexmap set up with hexes and sub-hexes. The basic premise is that things do not stay contained within their hexes and you can find signs or links to hexes straying into their neighbours.

Dicegoblin had a similar idea - Play Fetch: Linking Hexes Together With Adventure Ideas - though they were thinking of more explicit 'links/hooks' as a treasure trail, I am just thinking of 'intrusions/connections' not necessarily active adventure hooks.

Original shower inspiration notes

With a hex split into 13-19 subhexes depending on how you count the subhexes shared with neighbours, this concept gets you ideas for filling eight of them or 40-60% which is very handy for when you might have a lot to do.

Wetland Hills Encounters (Hexcrawl25)

Running the hex-crawl I realised I needed an encounter table for the general region and cooked up the below for 'folks likely to be wandering around with purpose'.

This will be a dual-use table:
Minor factions of the wetland hills (roll 2d6)
Random Encounter (roll d20)

Hexcrawl25 and Hex Kit

Returning to the challenge of juggling between scales of hexes and sub-hexes while bringing my Hexcrawl25 map to table, I switched to Hex Kit. I used the Classic, Fantasyland and Travelling Through Dangerous Scenery hex packs.

Azgaars was good for the 10 mile hex scale but now I wanted to get down to 2.5 mile hex scale. The main thing grinding my gears was getting things consistent between levels, marking in the terrain and all that. To start off with I created a layer and just drew in some hexes to help with orientation. THe gray ones are sub-hexes shared between two macro-hexes. Sub-hex A1 is outlined for orientation.

The chunk of the map I am trying to work up is the centre of this hex grid; hexes A1-A7.

Hexcrawl25 and Azgaar's Fantasy Map Generator

tl:dr; Azgaars Fantasy Map Generator is a good tool to get your broad strokes regions - your hexes - for you to then fill in your sub-hexes.

I set out to do Hexcrawl25 and made some poor decisions. Happily, these have revealed themselves in the first half of January rather than mid-year. I chose to scale up, which was a poor choice, revealed upon actual contact with a table, and so I have adjusted to scale down.

For... reasons I can no-longer recall, all my work on my campaign world so far is mapped with 10 mile hexes. This is not *entirely* useless but it is not great. I have done too much work with things at 10 mile to start changing things now - the campaign map for my home campaign is in 10 mile hexes, I am committed at this point. I used the following settings in Azgaar to get this; in the Style tab, selected the Grid element and set the scale to 0.1333 for 10 mile hexes.

I previously figured since the challenge was 24 mile / 6 mile, I would scale up to 40 mile / 10 mile - which you can see in the images below. Since taking this to table, I realise I have massively overshot and instead will be going 10 mile / 2.5 mile; our adventures will now take place in what would be hex A below and all those 10-mile sub-hexes within it are going to get broken down into 2.5 mile hexe.

I am happy enough with 2.5 mile hexes as close enough to the 3mile hex that is what you can walk in an hour and how far you can see. What is interesting is that zooming down that direction knocks out lots of the big regional shifts in religion/culture/nations.

I grabbed screen-shots of my Azgaars for the area I wanted with a bit of care - fullscreen, overlaid exactly - then fiddled with the full region template until it all lined up. I did this all in powerpoint and then just pushed and pulled different layers forward and back. This is clumsy as hell compared to layer manipulation in a dedicated photo editor but good enough to get by.

Actual test: hexcrawl mechanics (launch session)

Launched a new campaign, trying to bring hex-crawling to my open tables; I thought I would write it up from a deployment of actual hexcrawling mechanics to see how/if this type of play mechanically differed from 'standard 5e with a map'.

Session log with a mechanics focus

Hexcrawl '25 Launch

For Hexcrawl25, taking the challenge on, I decided to make a couple of modifications out of the gate.

First off being that instead of it being a 24 mile hexes/6 mile sub-hexes, I'll be using a 40 mile-10 mile because my campaign world was already hexed to 10-mile hexes. Rather than subdivide I wuill just block up to a bigger 'regional' hex at 40 miles.

Next I want to use this to feed a West Marches type campaign fairly shortly so this is going to get put into service pretty quickly. I may be accelerating parts of this quite a bit.

Then what I am basically planning to do is cookie cutter a chunk out of an existing block of the world that exists from Azgaars Fantasy Map Generator and use that.

This is replacing the draw a map, hex it up, identify your like sub-hex elements approach. What I will do instead is use the biome, culture, nation, and religion filters on the existing campaign world to provide the seeds for the hex-elements. Hex-creation by interpolation, if you will.

Review: Home - A Light In The Darkness

tl:dr; a neat, curated set of modular hex-crawl rules for a more faction-oriented game with a focus on securing resources.

I backed the zine 'Home - A light in the Darkness' which is billed as a sandbox toolkit for TTRPGs. Given the mileage I've gotten out of the d30 Sandbox Companion I thought this was worth a look.

This is a lot packed into a 36 page zine, a little sparse for someone coming new to the concept but a great, taut workflow for those who know the basics already.

What do you get in it?

Campaign Spin-Up V - adding tension to your campaign location

Taking the challenge of Beginnings for the January 2023 RPG Blog Carnival from Of Dice and Dragons I want to talk about stacking gunpowder in the corners of a setting. For more on what this means see Wandering Gamist "Gisli's Saga and Boot Hill" on how one could set up a powderkeg for a campaign location.

I am testing this during the spin-up of a West Marches style campaign dubbed 'Southern Reaches' - set to the south of my existing Home Campaign. The original process is from Boot Hill and while I don't want to mimic the 'everything one step from murder' of that campaign I think we do want to bake in factions, goals and stakes folk might have. Somewhere I heard 'the fights are so vicious because the stakes are so small' - even if we are looking for a generally non-lethal setting, one where the locals have views that the players might upset is better (for a sandbox) than 'dedicated villain'.

Back to our source: "what makes for good intrigue in a tabletop game?
- There must be many diverse agendas and moving parts to navigate.
- Players should know they should step carefully and never be certain how well they’re succeeding.
- They must feel the consequences of failure, but also that these fates are fair and not arbitrary."

From efforts so far using 'Downtime as Worldbuilding', map-reading and randomly generated city aspects and map elements we have a start on what this region is, and from the test of Deck of Worlds we have a few local elements.

The Boot Hill example is a 'high potential' unstable equilibrium - the slightest disruption and it is all going to turn into gunsmoke and arson. I think what I want for this game is a slightly more buried set of problems, ones that the locals will get sore about but not that will get people knifed in their sleep (not as a first response, in any case). From our Session Zero we have identified that the players want to start off operating out of a tavern on the edge of a wilderness, being a band of Merry Men. As the players will be newcomers to the locality, I am going to set things up as they were the day before they arrived and then let the consequences of the players actions domino from there.

So I need to comb through what has been generated and see how it all gels together. This could be seen as 'emergent faction building' from the world-building stages so far.

The things I want to establish are:
- Big personalities that get talked about locally - the power players small folk curse for their taxes or toast to their health.
- Agents of some of the big organisations - the faces the players will actually see.
- Some local players in the town of Balronco.