Campaign Retrospective: Realm of the Reluctant King (Hexcrawl25 )

Finally ran the last session for the main-line of the Hexcrawl25 campaign, so let us do a retrospective Against the Wicked City style since there were a lot of experimental practices running under the hood in this one.

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:

Fear not the big booms

tl;dr: no need to be afraid of early-modern fire-arms in your campaign

longstanding question about guns in D&D - my experiences no need to worry too much. I have had gunpowder crop up in two campaigns so far - Spelljammer Light of Xaryxis and Hexcrawl25 Realm of the Reluctant King - and in neither did it wreck the campaign.

First and most simply - one of the party was a musket armed Giff in the Spelljammer game and they played the part of a sniper par excellence - but no moreso than the long-bow wielding elf I adventured alongside in Out of the Abyss. Campaign took place in wildspace/on planets and in any case I was playing the campaign as written so no phlogiston nor the ignition risk of gunpowder associated with that. All in all, it was wholly a flavour thing beyond one trap made out of gunpowder barrels.

The players even made fairly large scale anti-shipping contraptions they launched with some spiky trap things included but never tried to acquire or incorporate gunpowder for whatever reasons.

In the second campaign - the Hexcrawl25 game - gunpowder had a lot more of a place but still did not break the game or ruin the flavour. It was introduced somewhat as an accident because I had resolved to try and use as much of Knock#1 as possible in that campaign and so when they searched the back rooms of a tavern unexpectedly I decided the '20 Gunpowders' table could be fun and it went from there.

The first thing they found was a heap of 'dragonpowder' - magical thermite essentially that "a wizard left there" which they stuffed into a bag and scarpered with. Afterwards I used a usage dice system to track depletion for their rather random use of it. It came in very handy for venturing through an insectfolk labyrinth where they used it to burn open some vaults.

With the knowledge that in-world there were such things, they took themselves to a goblin-market and traded various battlefield lootings for some more explosive powders - a handful of vials of saintsbone and a pouch of organic goblins-own gunpowder that could theoretically be self-replenishing. After this they took themselves off to commission a shotgun/blunderbus type weapon for the dwarf and after that considered themselves ready. These were a few mini-quests over a series of sessions as they were traipsing too and fro across the hexmap so I considered those things well earned.

Their final set up was for the dwarf to have the shotgun with their small squire riding on their shoulder and serving as a loader in fights. They also put a saddle-horn type mount for the gun on the top of their big lizard beast of burden so that the two small minions could operate it from beast-back while everyone else dismounted to fight on foot.

In the end, it never came into play as a game-breaking thing - it let the dwarf fighter participate in fights at range alongside the sorcerer and artificer - at about the same level of effectivenss which I could live with. Often at close quarters the noise of using the shotgun stopped it from being a 'first strike' weapon and the party as a whole leaned more on magic.

The funny thing is that these gunpowders came into play at the climax of each of the dungeons in Knock#1:
- In Citadel of Evil a batch of dragonpowder bundled to a vial of alchemists fire was catapulted into the main stairwell and set off an inferno that both torched out the top floors of the castle but also cut off the main villains line of retreat.
- In Praise the Fallen the main villain was about to teleport away on their initiative when the herbalist-themed artificer catapulted a bundle of all the saintsbone at their feet for great fistfuls of damage dice. This also threw some damage on most of the party and deafened them but it did succeed in over-killing the villain before they could flee
- In Zaratazarat's Manse when they found the mysterious monster-spawning slab they dumped most of their remaining dragonpowder onto it to burn through the slab while they fought the rest of the things around them. If I recall correctly some poor unfortunate bullywug or locathah spawned onto the table in the middle of that inferno and did not have a fun time either.

Otherwise, the dragonpowder saw the most use for burning through things and general destruction and mayhem against non-moving foes or other obstructions. Weirdly, they also decided during one significant night carousing to try inhaling dragonpowder and some more rolls on the goblin activity table established it to be a fairly effective hang-over cure.

There was two other notable uses of explosives throughout the campaign - first to cover a prison escape and second to collapse a doorway with hostiles on the far side.

The prison escape hinged off roping in some dwarven artificers who were part of the group being rescued to set up the trigger mechanisms to turn the explosives the players could supply into the time-delayed inferno they needed. I was pretty happy with this, as it was a pretty cunning plan overall relying on a pushing a rigged mine-cart onto a lift to the enemy camp above and then running like hell. The challenge for the players was not trivialised by the availability of explosives, so all to the good.

The door collapse was during the final session - while fighting thralls in "The Aboleths Dream" by Elven Tower the party had wedged the door leading into room seven while they fought other thralls. More thralls gathered from room(s) eight to bash down the door and had splintered it open Shining style when one of the party Catapults a bundle of vials of explosives wrapped around an alchemists fire. Big kaboom, bought them time to run off, and on their exit up stairs one they touched off the last of their gunpowder to shatter the entrance and let them get away.

In two separate campaigns the players never really went all-in on the potential of having access to explosives - except for the above 'big boss killer' moments. We were not seeing land-mine equivalents, doors being blown off hinges, explosives rolled into enemy strong points or similar item-focussed problem solving.

To mirror this, I did not lean heavily into explosives being in the hands of adversaries - the RAW magical ranged attacks of Astral Elves in the Light of Xaryxis campaign were sufficient for them. For the hexcrawl, the two major groups of adversaries so far have been mobs of cultists ambushed in tunnels and great beasts fought out in the open, neither of which have been made boring by the dwarf having a shotgun. The tunnel fights had a big element of sneaking about to not draw down the rest of the dungeon which kept things interesting. The big beasts were generally big enough that even a shotgun was not going to cut much mustard.

The main lesson I took from all this was that the gamebreaking potential of low-rate of fire weapons is overstated - the magical fire-power of standard classes of characters is equivalent, if not better. I cannot promise if you throw in some odd explosives for flavour, your players won't wreck your campaign but two completely different sets of players (different ages, nationalities, game formats) did not leverage them to wreck mine so maybe you'll be fine too.

Wrapping a campaign on time

With an upcoming campaign end in sight, I am looking at how to wrap things up for my Hexcrawl25 campaign. The fact that it is still going into 2026 is a nice fillip but with a small householder on the way, better to tie things off than have it hanging over me.

I had a rummage around for wisdom on the web and DungeonFruit has some good ideas - but in a 'you should have started way back there' too-late-now sense. Dungeonfruit talks about "setting up your end condition" in Beginning Of The End (How To Finish A Campaign). Alas I am going almost perfectly against their advice and going with a real-world time limit - there is not an ticking clock hanging over the campaign, it was always about the party chasing after their own goals; a pure sandbox.

Beginning the wrap up

This means we are looking to align the end of campaign with players accomplishing their goals, not any particular big plot of mine. I told them the time they had left two sessions back and to think what they wanted to get achieved in that time. This is throwing the responsibility to manage their time on the players, which is fully in line with how the campaign has been running so far - they set the tempo, they go where they like, I run the world they are poking about in.

Throughout the campaign we have periodically been using the Ultimate RPG Campfire Card Deck and that has revealed or crystallised quite a few player chosen goals. I have catalogued them as they had come up - some have resolved, others are beyond the scope of the campaign but still some remain that could be achieved. Thus in the absence of an over-arching plot I will aim to let the PC's threads come to a resolution.

Personal quests folk had picked (and succeeded)
- found the Kingdom of Ashley, rescue and install the 'king' (collective)
- get a giant spider mount (the dwarf warrior)
- become reknowned (the 'wizard')
- create their own herbarium (the 'herbalist')

Open plots at time of trying to set up the finale
- meet their destined true love, as foreseen by a seer they met in a deep mine (the tundra barbarian)
- finish clearing out the local cult lair (collective)

Plan to the end

At this point this means that I am going to budget my time as getting one big quest done per session - maybe we will achieve more but going by prior rate of questing, probably not. So with a session filled by them finishing out the dungeon delve/cult clearance they are currently embarked upon that leaves three for resolving the 'destined true love' hook - which should be fine. The in-house testing team helped me figure out how to time it all, I know what elements I need to have to hand, the rest just runs off the hexmap.

Note, in between writing the first draft of this and now completing it, the party continued to clear out the cult lair they had been camped at - and are now easily a half session remaining before they are done and have taken some fairly heavy blows along the way. I am going to have to adjust my timeline from here - there may be a rest period, or reluctance to get stuck into further heroics? We shall see.

I think what I need to do is to set up multiple smaller elements - resolvable within a half session or so - and then keep/drop some as the time runs down, so the final session can be a reasonable declaration of victory, wherever they get to. Assuming they do not TPK along the way, which remains a possibility.

The one big thing I am taking from Dungeonfruit is to leave time for 'wrap up' and/or epilogue - I will give each of the players some running room to say how things turn out in the aftermath of all their deed - but I need to remember to leave that time and bring things to a close a little early on that last night.

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 scramble for the finish

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.

Where I started

Hexmap was at 77% completion vs target of 88% - however sufficient hexes to make target *have been created* just not within the bounds of the actual challenge.

My players wandered off the south east corner and threatened to wander West, North, East and South West necessitating that I put at least some effort into the broad strokes of those directions.

However, that cuts no mustard against the challenge in hand so we need to spot our gaps and fill them pronto. Check progress since mid-year here if you like.

Happily, no hex has nothing in it, all have at least the four or so sub-hexes that their core faction inhabitants account for.

[see faction hex populating technique]

Otherwise I need to
- do 'bleed over' for more of the remaining hexes but I fell into a slightly too elaborate process for doing that - making a grid, rigorously marking out the hexes I was going to work up, figuring out all the relevant neighbours and then working down those columns. This works but is a bit time consuming and maybe we are past time to just work directly onto the map.
- fill a bunch of 'holes' left even in quite old sections of the map which are just off the beaten track that I need to fill in.
- I am going to ruthless stuff 'harbinger' hexes into all the border hexes on the edge of the map, letting me squeeze some credit for the off-map work I did

Leafwander festival for the ruin-filled swamplands (RPG Blog Carnival )

This months prompt for the RPG Blog Carnival is by the long-time host of Dice and Dragons themselves - Feasts and Festivals in Your TTRPG Campaign.

In honour of this I will be adding in a 'background festival' to tweak the existing carousing routine. My Hexcrawl25 table has proven receptive to burning off their gold for XP by carousing so I have 'used up' a fair few entries on the previous d20 Carousing table for the ruin-filled swamplands.

Inspired by player activities to trample in trade routes and try to forge a realm out of the various swamp peoples, we see a revitalisation of the old festival of Leafwander. Here herbalists of all sorts trek a great circuit of the swamps visiting all sorts of communities they would not often to swap and sample leaves, herbs, berries, roots, nuts, fruit and seeds.

Reason for Celebration: The ancient rootes of this are fey, when the veil between worlds was thinner, and the fey courts visited. Now it is an early harvest festival, effectively marking the end of the summer markets. The number of travellers abroad for Leafwander is taken as an omen of how hard the winter will be, that generosity to strangers now will bring a good harvest. While not wrong, the truth is that hard times and unrest block travellers and herald foraging parties taxing the harvests and/or slaying / drafting the farmers.

Traditions and Rituals: Mostly marked by hanging out dried sprigs from doorways and setting an extra place at the table in case of a traveller. Should a travelling herbalist turn-up, often there will be an improptu gathering at a hosts house, with samples of all the best local things brought to try, news and tales exchanged, music played and the herbalists wares tried.

Herbalists themselves partaking of Leafwander will wear a crown of simple greenery - grass, common leaves or twigs - that they make afresh after each sharing. A traveller with a wilted crown will often be stopped by whatever others they meet - be they shepherds or charcoalers - to share whatever they have.

Atmosphere: for a smaller place, Leafwander will strongly resemble a village feast with the wanderer presiding. For large places, where many travellers have come together, Leafwander more resembles a market that goes on into the small hours with little to no coin changing hand. Strange smells of smokes and scents of teas are common, as cookfires roasting and boiling a variety of oddly spiced dishes. Weirder things like biting and stinging insects and frogs to be licked may also be found, at the asking of seekers, rarely openly offered.

Leafwander typically extends over a week, often sprawling to ten-days, as a relatively relaxed celebration of the variety of herbs, spices and food to be found in the swamp-lands.

At table

Thematically this is a small festival that can be used as a back-drop for other events or - as I need - something to modify and renew an existing carousing table - use as you see fit.

d6 twists to carousing during the Leafwander Festival
1. A provider of fine (strong) cigar-like leafs is here, enthusiastically joining in and rendering all proceedings somewhat breathless and dizzy.
2. An acrid tarpot burns beneath a pan of bubbling frog-sweat. Needles dipped and licked render participants langorous and intensely focussed.
3. A somewhat jittery traveller is serving a very spicy stew, giving handfuls of spicy leaves to everyone and insisting folk use them if people start acting not themselves.
4. A serpent-folk purveyor offers oddly-fitting vials filled with herb-steeped nectars, invigorating and clearing the mind.
5. A young herbalist toting an enormous ancient tome offers cold-teas brewed in pitcher-plants, astringent, calming and mildly-painkilling, they quiz people a little impolitely on how they like what they try.
6. A swamp trader with a wide range of goblin fare - fruit, seed and root combinations that yield psychadelic results, no two the same nor any effect replicable in true goblin fashion.

Actual Play - Hexcrawl25 - The Swooping Lizard Affair

Inspired by a discussion elsewhere I ran session #20 of my hexcrawl recently and it provided a nice illustration of pure map based play over an in-game day and a bit. Written up to follow Jenx first best practice: "Record your hobby experience" while continuing the DM commentary addition to the session notes.

The short version; with a few days to kill until the party needs to pick up something and eager to test out a magical item that was alleged to make their draught-lizard faster, they set out to hike back up to a landmark they had seen. They sensibly navigate around hazards then spot something interesting, "Squirrel!" off the plan and end up wrestling with a wild-magic surged flying reptile mount in a session heavily driven by the wild-magic surge table.

Characters

Herb - Firbolg "Alchemist" (artificer)
Eggie - Goliath "Wizard" (wild-magic sorcerer)
Cortez - Dwarven Fighter

Plus minions
Clarabelle - tabaxi, small, servant
Fabricator Technician #207 - insectfolk, small, observer
Cedric - big lizard beast of burden

Session Recap

Actual Test: Murkmail Mixed Hexes Technique

Murkmail had a cool idea for hex/sub-hex encounter tables - Mixing hexcrawl encounter tables and I gave it a spin as part of Hexcrawl25.

I used it in a case where I had three influences in play - a chaos cult of shaven-headed snatchers who had been kidnapping locals and travellers, the local raccoon population and the beasts of the forest.

There was some adjustment required because the Hexcrawl25 set-up I am using is pointy side up and Murkmail uses flat side up but I was able to muscle through that and fit the cultists (yellow), raccoons (blue) and forest beasts (pink) into the format.

Splitting down the 19 sub-hexes into 7/7/5 was helpful as a concentrator - I was able to use my 'five things a faction is doing' for both the raccoons and the cult - then throw in a few points of mutual interference. After that the forest beasts and provided opportunity to showcase terrain hazards and then throw in some monsters too. I had an existing general monsters encounters list that was usually getting superseded by hex-specific encounters, this provided a good opportunity to refocus on that.

Re-written into Murkmails format

Actual Play - Yaksha's Hexfill Method (Part 2)

Closing out a table test a Brian Yaksha's Hexfill method on a 'fill as you go' basis on a previously un-explored part of the map. Written up to follow Jenx first best practice: "Record your hobby experience" while continuing the DM commentary addition to the session notes.

This second session had things work more smoothly, I was happy with how it played out. As before, I was working off a single page print-off of all the tables, double column, minimal borders and using that with an overloaded encounter die.

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

Setup

The party was continuing to try and evacuate a large column of freed prisoners through a swamp. Play picked up with the party catching up with the column of refugees they had let be escorted on ahead by some other adventurers they hired. Approx 175 people in the column, rested but with no food, with four hours left until sundown.

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:

Actual Play - Yaksha's Hexfill Method (Part 1)

I got the chance to table test a Brian Yaksha's Hexfill method on a 'fill as you go' basis on a previously un-explored part of the map, trying this out at table it worked pretty well with a little squeak because of unusual circumstances. Written up to follow Jenx first best practice: "Record your hobby experience" while continuing the DM commentary addition to the session notes.

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

Actual Test: Yaksha's Hexfill Method

I saw this on Brian Yaksha of Goatman's Goblet's bluesky feed - and have been looking for an opportunity to test it. Interestingly, on a first attempt it flared out and did not work for me where I already had too many ideas, it worked really well for a different region where I only had some vague ones.

The framework that Yaksha pulled together has the following:
- 1 Unique Encounter
- 2 Tools/Gimmicks for the region
- d10+d4 Local Encounters
- d10 Small Jobs
- d6 Big Jobs
- d20 Scene-setting sights/stage design
- d6 bounties/location implications
- d6 ways to expand/change-up the area set to tone.
- 3d10 names for places (locales/nature sights/crossings.)

The area where it worked (red circle below), I had just a few facts. I had previously attempted to run it for the hex below, the yellow-boxes and it just bogged down for me. I will do a post-mortem at the end on the failure.

For context, the party had just made their way from the bold outlined hex on a rescue, climbing up onto the plateau region (yellow boxes) effecting a rescue at the south-eastern-most yellow box and then dashing for the nearest edge of the escarpment with a large caravan of rescued prisoners. Their theory was that the plateau rainforests were unknown, terrain, home to the people they had just raided while the swamps below were more familiar terrain for most party members and they prefered that, even if it were an unknown part of the swamps.

Working the process

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.

Carousing table for the ruin-filled swamplands

To encourage the squandering of gold for XP accrual I came up with the following carousing table for my Hexcrawl25 campaign. Given that most of the players are veterans of my Brancalonia 'Bay of Princes' campaign, I adapted the Brancalonia Revelry table - you go carousing and always roll; high is good.

To adapt a little towards encouraging the squandering of gold, I have players declare what gold they are squandering and then roll.

The entries were cooked up partly inspired by events so far in the campaign and partly by the local cultures and ruins. These were then combined with a spark list of possible effects and consequences - fights, good times, reputation changes, followers, hitpoints, contacts and romantic partners, allies, enemies, illness, rumours. Stirring them all together gives us the rough table below.

d20 Revelrous Incidents

Broadbrush Hex-filling for Hexcrawl25

With the players having wandered around a bit and the 'shape' of the play space having come a little more into focus I cycled back around to the greater hex map because their focus now is a little off center for the initial "super-hex". The red splotch is the broad area of operations for the part to date - threatening to head off out of the super-hex to the west or north west.

Most recently for this Hexcrawl25 I have been populating sub-sub-hexes based on the factions present in sub-hexes and neighbouring sub-hexes which is a zoomed-in approach that works well for generating more detail from coarse understanding of hexes. It is failing me when I come to the edge of the hexes and am missing any detail on the neighbour to interact with. I need to zoom back out to come up with broad-brushstrokes and then delve down to details again.

I followed three principles here:
1. Zooming out to look at and honour the terrain of the greater region
2. Conservation of NPCs/factions towards what he players had encountered to date
3. Go to the good stuff first.

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.

Campaign Spin-Up IX - Dual-Mode Hex-Crawl (Continuous Campaign/Episodic)

I stood up a campaign to test and drive my #Hexcrawl25 challenge that had been intended to operate in two modes:
* Classic continuous campaign
* Episodic open table

The time and venue is the Friday night open table sessions I play at - historically I offered an open-table (Brancalonia, Spelljammer Academy) but I wanted to try and mix in something more persistent with returning players. The deliberate aspects of this campaign were:
- dual mode - A-team / open table on alternating weeks
- follow the players, drop hooks but no big plot
- toy deployment - use the shelves of books
- newbie friendly

I decided to run the campaign part on a biweekly basis and on the off-week run one-shots. Both will use the common starting villlage of the hexmap.