Kandahar asks:
Can you run hexcrawls in a very small location? For example, I have a a single valley I want my players to explore. I made a map in Worldographer, but I used 2-mile hexes. I don’t think it’s reasonable to impose very slow travel. Even if this is densely populated, is there any way I can run this properly?
The Alexandrian hexcrawl uses a player-unknown 12-mile hexes because I’ve found huge advantages to using this as a default structure. But there are lots of reasons for why you might want to make different choices. For example, in my remix of Desccent Into Avernus, I used a 60-mile hex for the Avernian hexcrawl, partly because I wanted vast, empty spaces and partly because the PCs are expected to be using fast-moving war machines.
So you can absolutely use a hexcrawl for a smaller location. But there will be specific challenges you’ll want to think about.
First, as you note, travel speed will not constrain the PCs’ exploration range to a reasonable number of hexes. Therefore, you need some other constraint. This might be:
- geographic – e.g., mountain ranges restrict and slow down movement
- magical – e.g., this all takes place inside a tiny pocket dimension; there’s a magical dome over the valley; the PCs are trapped in the valley by a magical curse and cannot leave
- non-diegetic – e.g., “This campaign is about the Valley of the Moon, so we don’t leave the Valley of the Moon.”
Second, hex visibility. I use 12-mile hexes because it lets me plausibly only think about the hex the PCs are currently in and specific, highly visible-from-a-distance landmarks. When you’re using smaller 2-mile hexes, spot distances suddenly start creating problems.
One problem is needing to communicate lots of different terrain types to the players: A human should know not only their hex, but all the hexes around them, too. And they’ll probably have at least a general idea of the terrain two hexes away, too! Even a little bit of elevation could easily let them see three hexes away. Pick any hex on the map above and think about how you could describe all of that in a rolling, detailed, meaningful fashion as the PCs move across the valley.
To help counteract this, you may want to use player-known hexes. This will have the advantage of creating a clear communication channel for the terrain. (The disadvantage is that it becomes much more difficult to handle getting lost and, aesthetically, I’ve found this significantly reduces immersion.)
The other problem, though, is juggling keyed locations: If the PCs can see seven hexes, it’s not just about communicating terrain. You’re also juggling seven different hex keys to know what you need to describe to them. That’s a lot of page-flipping to load that information and a lot of mental juggling to keep it all straight. Then they’ll immediately move to another hex and you’ll need to pull 3+ more hexes all at once to describe what they see.
You can counteract this a bit by labeling visible locations directly on the GM’s hex map. You might even want to prep a one-page cheat sheet with 1-2 sentence descriptions of each visible location. That way you can identify what to describe directly from the map and use the cheat sheet to describe it without needing to flip through all the detailed hex descriptions. (This is, of course, extra prep, but trust me, you’ll want it. Even with larger 12-mile hexes, I’ll still do this prep for any locations large enough to be visible from distant hexes.)
Your third challenge is that the combination of all these factors means that wilderness exploration will likely not be a significant part of the campaign: The PCs are going to rapidly move through the entire area and know where everything is.
On the one hand, you can lean into this with not only player-known hexes, but also by just giving them the entire terrain map at the beginning of the campaign. (You’ll often discover this also makes sense diegetically, since the relatively smaller scope of the make makes it harder to believe that, for example, the local villagers don’t know that there’s a forest 10 miles to the east.)
This, of course, calls into question why you’re using a hexcrawl structure in the first place. (There are better, cleaner structures for having lots of targeted movement.) To counteract this, I recommend keying lots of hidden locations – sites where the PCs will need to go to a specific hex and deliberately explore it in order to find out what’s hiding there. (Although they’d still have a chance of stumbling across it randomly while simply moving through the hex.)
And by lots, I mean lots and lots and lots. My gut says you probably want a majority of the hexes in a smaller hexcrawl like this to be hidden.
MECHANICAL TWEAKS
At this point, of course, we’ve moved away from the core gameplay loop of the Alexandrian hexcrawl: Players are now largely looking at a known hex map and pointing at a specific hex they want to go to and explore so that they can fill in its secrets on their map. To make this a smoother experience, you’re going to want to throw out some other stuff and redesign it.
For example, I would throw out D&D’s traditional movement system and recalculate movement rate as a per-way or per-day hex budget. The exact budget, of course, would depend on the hex scale you’re using, but you likely want a base rate of 1 movement point = 1 hex. Then rate terrain types by the number of movement points required to move into them. (You will not be able to make these values match by-the-book movement rates. I would suggest getting your base movement rate “close enough” and then creating a tier of 2-point terrain and a tier of 3-point terrain.)
You may also want to jettison navigation checks entirely. Or, alternatively, simplify these mechanics so that getting lost just means getting turned around inside your current hex (e.g., pay the movement cost of the hex, but don’t actually move out). The thing to think about, as you’re fine-tuning this for your needs, is what makes Being Lost an interesting experience. (With the player-unknown 12-mile hexes of the Alexandrian hexcrawl, players are making and/or navigating with their own map and if they become disoriented those activities become challenging in their own right and can also lead the players to make unexpected discoveries. This tends not to happen with player-known hexes, where it’s almost always obvious when they’ve gone astray.)
You may, of course, discover other pain points once you start actually running your modified hexcrawl. That’s to be expected! But with a little forethought, hopefully you won’t have to do much more than tweak things in response to your playtesting to have a great campaign!
