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

Nominations for GLoGgies 2025

Vivanter of Mediums and Messages is collating the GLoGgies and so I make my nominations below for the best of the GLoGosphere 2025. Deadline for nominations is Jan 5th if you want to make yours.

The Categories
* Best Dungeon Post
* Best Class Post
* Best Monster Post
* Best Rules Post
* Best Lore Post
* Best Theory Post
* Best Other Post

Adapted from Vivanters original

The big theme I have this year is 'tilling the blog-soil' - things that let us get even more use from blogposts past or draw out community participation through blogwagons.

Best Dungeon Post

Converting GLoG Classes into Dungeons by Mediums and Messages.

I like this as a converter that takes one font of creativity (the many, many classes of GLoG) and allows it to serve another purpose, the unending need for dungeons!

Best Class Post

2023 - GLOG classes recap by Salty Goo

For sheer elbow grease, this has to deserve recognition - compiling all the GLoG classes of 2023. Also, gets my thumbs up for helping to bring gems of the past back to the surface - a theme, I support.

Best Monster Post

A Beholder for your Setting - Lantern Heads by Garamondia

A post so good it kicked off a bandwagon, plus a genius monster that has massive potential to make fascinating campaigns and feel eerie but manageable once you figure out their schtick. Top notch stuff, if you give one of my recommendations weight, make it this one.

Best Rules Post

GLoGhack: Masters of the Strait 🏴‍☠️ by Phlox

Comes in both setting-integrated and neutral version.

Best Lore Post

Beyond Iskander’s Gate: Mothership Hack for 923 A.D Central Asia Campaign by Silverarm Press

Strictly Mothership, not GLoG but lots of good stuff here.

Best Theory Post

Pillaging 2016 GLOG by Tabletop Curiosity Cabinet

I wholeheartedly support tilling up the good ideas of earlier years and putting them back into service. Shape and replace thereafter, but at least hasten your progress with the good ideas of before.

Best Other Post

G L Å U G U S T 2 0 2 5 by The Nothic's Eye

Reenergised the GLoGtober event by recognising calendar congestion and shifting it up to the quiet months of summer.

Shiny TTRPG links #256

Links to some serious thinking as people purge their draft folders before the end of the year. For yet more, see last weeks collection or the weekly r/OSR blogroll or check the RPG Blog Carnival. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch End of Week links.

Alone in the Labyrinth launches #City26 challenge for next year and also gives us City of 100 Gods, Traders Wake: They Who Store The Grain (35); The Deep One (36).

Viridian Void Productions shares Die Hard is OSR

Binary Star Games gives us Conflict as Motivation and Resolution

Billhook Blog writes In Praise of the Pit

Gorgon Bones shares “Boring” Combat is Fine Actually

Methods & Madness gives us Old school swarms/minions (B/X, OSE, AD&D, etc.)

dungeon doll shares Elves

Kill It With Fire! gives us Rotating Players, Stable PCs Campaign Plan

Habeeb (@beeboobubie) writes the default dungeon is colonial

Afraid of Encounters gives us Anti-colonial Dungeon

The Dododecahedron shares Crossing the Dungeon Rubicon

Patchwork Paladin asks Why Go Hexcrawling?

Old Men Running The World gives us How to get better at improvising

Connecting the Fictional Dots shares The Grand Table of Settings – and a Christmas Game

MurkMail gives us The Stakes of Grimdark

Apocalypse for thee, but not for us (RPG Blog Carnival )

This month the RPG blog carnival is hosted by Advantage on Arcana and has the topic of The End Times And After - which is an interesting one.

The End Times for a given world are not 'the End of all things' and things continue thereafter - see the weird time epochs collected on Coins and Scrolls or last summers Blog Carnival topic "It Came From Beyond Time" where I went into some of the ways that things can survive through 'deep time'. We also see that 'the end times' of a given people may be little to nothing for their neighbours (d6 Sites of the Long Wars) and also that adventure can be found in the immediate aftermath of the end-times: d12 post-apocalyptic worlds (GLoGtober '22).

Things eventually bounce back - especially when we are dealing with a multiverse teeming with life - even a world burnt to a cinder is briefly a paradise for fire-elementals before turning into a rock suitable for dao, xorn and other rock-creatures.

All this assumes your apocalypse hit hard enough to disrupt the underdark and the oceans, both of which provide vast reservoirs of hardy life which can re-seed a devastated land.

Menagerieworld has four great extinction events - where "the fate lines pinched out" - running back to the distant past. Multiple devastating conflicts and continent shaking events barely register on such a scale.

One can have truly global 'end times' with nuclear winters, the fading of life and the long wait for re-seeding from the seas, underdark, wildspace of the planes - but one can get most of the same adventurable bang-for-buck from a continental apocalypse; sufficiently large that it is practically beyond escaping but still leaving the possibility of remnants out there.

One kind of 'post apocalypse as we don't generally understand them' is something unique to our fantasy realms - where a thriving civilization can essentially be cut down while its neighbours or even some of its citizens carry on.

d6 possible 'post-apocalyptic' games
1. The elves of this world all just withered away - their soul-tree in Arvandor died. What is found in their forest holds? What treasures slipped from their fingers? What gates they held barred now fall open?
2. An illithid invasion swept this world, nautiloids hang in the skies and subterranean cities are being constructed. You are one of the inedible races - warforged, plasmoids, dhampir - carve out a niche in the new order
3. The seas rose, much has drowned - you are in one of the few remaining spots of protruding land - adapt to this new water world and its now pre-eminent aquatic masters
4. Princes of Undeath - you and your peers have out-lasted the mortals, as was always the plan. They had some ragnarok, all souls went on and now, finally, the gameboard is clear and long-held grand ambitions can be pursued
5. The great chill - volcanic plumes have darkened the skies, sufficient to hold off the baleful sun - forests spread, the deserts shrink, the claw-locked grip of the lizard-folk empire are loosened. As they skulk off into hibernation or away to warmer climes, what to do?
6. The great migration - everyone just up and left, reasons unknown. Rumours of strange heralds beckoning and driving all through portals that opened everywhere. Are they gone for good? If not, when will they return?

The broad theme here is a massive shake to the system that opens a window for outsiders to potentially forge a new destiny in the abandoned palaces or ruins of the old.

Review: Green Corridor

tl;dr: an eco-restoration-themed map-crawler pamphlet game with some interesting resouce balancing mechanics.

I looked at this as a part of Capsule Reviews #9: HELLO//GOODBYE Charity Bundle but a chance draw from a review round-robin has geas-ed me to take another look - so let us delve deeper.

GREEN CORRIDOR has up to five players be agents of REWIND, a group of survivors of the climate catastrophe and corporatism that has ravaged the world. Agents seek out pockets of The Green, habitable regions where people and wildlife can flourish, aiming to reconnect them by exploring a hex-map and rebuild the world one ecological pathway at a time.

A punchy tri-fold pamphlet game, print it out and fold it, works well - good contrast, clear layout, nice piece of art for the front cover. So what do you actually get?

Shiny TTRPG links #255

Links from around the web. For yet more, see last weeks collection or the weekly r/OSR blogroll or check the RPG Blog Carnival. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch End of Week links.

Grackle Court gave me a most generous GLoGmas 2025 post: EXTRA Shiny TTRPG links - delve into the best links of all previous 254 collections!

Did you game at all this year? Have you a blog? Share how your year went with The Endie Awards from Lady Tabletop. Some examples so far from MixUpPixels with A Landmark Year - The Endies 2025, Luck Roll and Indie RPG Newsletter

Sam Seer's Blog proposes JOIN THE BLOGWAGON: Your Rule of Three!

The greatest poster in the world launches Gloggies 2025 nominations

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;