Quote from: Omega;1013716It was the first hybrid of CCG and RPG. I designed and footed the bill for some of the cards way back. Its a full blown RPG, but it uses cards instead. Around 2000 it had moved to a non-CCG format. The game was prediminantly a hexcrawl. Though Susan and Mark, the creators, laid it out in a grid. I laid mine out in a hex pattern. Like this.



As noted you had to keep track of food and water each day of travel and skills like hunting were important as getting lost was fairly common.

Unfortunately as I note in my review way back. It got saddles with an RPGA like guild that ended up alienating fans, and it had alot of fans, and the game declined.

But yeah. Hexcrawler RPG.

Mind if I use this image format for my own games? I can easily use that as a steppingstone from squares to hexes.

Quote from: mAcular Chaotic;1013694I wish there were some examples of this kind of thing. Either a stream, or a live play, or something. It's easier to grasp when seeing it in action.

Grab a copy of the revised Outdoor Survival map.  Point to six random hexes.  Here is the "Crypt of the Black Knight," "The Caves of Chaos," "The Lair of Celerus the Nutpuncher," "The Fire Swamp," "The Lost City of Ee," and "The Temple that Time Forgot."

Design the basics of those six adventures, one page each.

Use the random wilderness and travel tables for the rest.

Boom.   Done.

Quote from: jeff37923;1013732Mind if I use this image format for my own games? I can easily use that as a steppingstone from squares to hexes.

Feel free. Heres my other examples I use when the subject comes up.

Squares as a hex grid.



And a neat herringbone pattern someone showed me long ago and also makes for a hex grid using cards.

Nice! Consider them both used!

Quote from: Omega;1013834And a neat herringbone pattern someone showed me long ago and also makes for a hex grid using cards.

This looks really neat. That kind of layout could work nicely with some sort of terrain card. There would be 37 cards in that spread. You can that there is a repeating pattern to the tiling, and if your terrain cards had markings along the edge for matching, you could have a randomly generated yet organic and weirdly shape terrain to use on the spot. Kind of like Penrose Tiles but with cards.

I actually never used Outdoor Survival to create a game or campaign with, and instead, very early on, started a home brew hex crawl campaign using custom maps that I created, without using a random generator (because there was none) on blank hex paper pads that were available in the gaming section of Mile High Comics for 50 cents or a dollar. I enjoyed running wilderness adventures much more than running Dungeon adventures, and it would be a year (1978) before I would see the Judges Guild campaign hexagon books, and finally be able to start randomly creating wilderness maps. When DMG came out in 1980 I tried their Random Wilderness Campaign generator located back in the Appendix, but it was wonky and often generated really odd or conflicting encounters, that more often than not, that often failed to match anything that was actually happening in the game.

Did you have any procedures, either prep or at-the-table, that you or the group would go through to mediate travel over the map? Did the procedure change if the travel was along a "well known/well marked" route, or between points that the party has previously visited often? While traveling into "unexplored" territory? How much view did the players have to the maps? Did they have to make their own?

(Anyone can feel free to answer these questions! )

Quote from: Telarus;1013878Did you have any procedures, either prep or at-the-table, that you or the group would go through to mediate travel over the map? Did the procedure change if the travel was along a "well known/well marked" route, or between points that the party has previously visited often? While traveling into "unexplored" territory? How much view did the players have to the maps? Did they have to make their own?

(Anyone can feel free to answer these questions! )

For D&D we played it that you never got lost on a known and marked road or an area you had explored to in a hex often enough to know where it is each time. Or mapped it. You might take the wrong fork. But you were not totally turned around in the hex unless you entered it from a different direction. The players mapped as they went along and usually some local areas were known. I carried that over as a DM and so usually the players will know whats in the start hex and the adjacent ones and possibly any known roads to other towns. But not whats in beyond the roads and towns local.

In Dragon Storm you can get lost multiple times in a area due to the sheer size of each which is a days travel. The type of terrain you were in determined some things like how many hours it would take to rest and recharge, how much food was expended while in the area and any environ effects. For known or mapped areas the GM usually laid out the "map" for those areas so the players could plan a course or at least plan for the terrain the would pass through.

Quote from: Telarus;1013878Did you have any procedures, either prep or at-the-table, that you or the group would go through to mediate travel over the map? Did the procedure change if the travel was along a "well known/well marked" route, or between points that the party has previously visited often? While traveling into "unexplored" territory? How much view did the players have to the maps? Did they have to make their own?

(Anyone can feel free to answer these questions! )

Early on, we didn't have or couldn't afford minis, so almost everything we did was theater of the mind where we would provide a simple locale or traveling description, and the players would use their imagination to fill in the additional details. As a GM, I loved making intricately detailed maps (and still do!), and this made providing descriptions during travel much easier, because I could take one look at the map and then say something like this...

GM: "It's a cool partly cloudy morning as you break camp. You can hear the roar of the surf, and know that the inland sea is just a hundred yards or so east. Looking out over the sea from your campsite, you can just make out vaguely detailed islands in the distance. There are no ships or boats visible at the moment, just the enormous shallow sea to the east with sluggish slow rolling low waves and seaweed, ...lots of sea weeds. As your group begins traveling South, you are putting the open Northern Plain of Tefi behind you. On your right in the extreme distance just at the limit of your vision you can see the mountains of Tefi, and can just make out the great escarpment, a series of cliffs and drops from the highlands that abruptly drops almost a thousand feet to the coastal plain. You have heard the stories, that there are almost no trails leading down from the great escarpment, just an impassible series of cliffs and canyons that run for more than a hundred miles parallel to the coast you are traveling on. Traveling along the coastal road is much safer as there are bandits, and brigands, sorcerors, faithless nomads, and monsters that make that warren of canyons, caves, and drops to the west their home.

GM: Ahead, you'd guess that  you have two or maybe three days travel through Saryn remaining before reaching the city of Tythwen. the Cadawyn Forest is just ahead a few miles, and by nightfall you should be making camp in the Northern foothills of the Saryn Mountains. What is the travel order, and what are you all doing while you are traveling?....

Player1: What is the Road like?

GM: It's a well built slightly elevated cobblestone road in fairly good shape, it's overgrown in just a few places, but there are two slights cuts on the surface of the road, the mark of countless wagon wheels from many hundreds of merchant caravans.

Player2: The Paladin and the Ranger are leading. The Wizard and Cleric are riding side-by-side behind them, they are leading the two pack horses, and the Thief is keeping a lookout from the tail end of the party.

GM: (rolling 2d6)... The morning passes uneventfully. By lunchtime the sky has cleared of clouds, and it has warmed up considerably, being maybe eighty degrees  (that is 26C for you Euro folks). There are fewer areas of open Plains around you more thickets of brush, and copses of green leafed trees. What are you doing?

Player 5: "Is there anything following us on the road?"

GM: "No. But even though you can no longer see the coast, you can still hear the surf and smell the Inland sea on your left."

Player 1: What do we know about the Cadawyn Forest?

GM: (Rolls a d20 against the players WIS. If the roll is less, than the player knows a story or two about the Cadawyn...) You don't know anything in particular, The Rangers knows that a Black Dragon once made the forest his home and for a time terrorized everyone within a hundred miles of this spot, but he flew off some years ago and had not been heard from since... And the Wizard also heard a rumor that a great Druid also once lived in these woods. The Cleric has never been here before, and the Thief will tell you all about the forest. The dense part of the forest stretches about fifteen miles from east to west, and is about ten miles from North to South. The Coastal road travels right through it. About two decades ago during the time of the bandit raids about a decade back, of the notorious Brigand Toza used the forest as one of his hideouts.

Player 2: "I'll lead, and use my Ranger tracking skills to see if anyone has traveled through here recently."

GM: (rolling percentiles, a 29, Success!... Quickly rolls up a random encounter to simulate what else was on this patch of road recently.) Aside from evidence of many seagulls, you also find very fresh Blink Dog spoor maybe a day old, and ..uh... there is evidence in the trees alongside the road, small animal sized silk white and violet cocoons in pockets of dense wood just off the road, ...clear evidence that Phase Spiders have been here recently. The cocoons have been here undisturbed for at least four days... Are you going to try to find the tracks of the Phase Spiders? ...It is about lunchtime what are you all doing?


...and so on...


The Players don't have a map, but they could buy one in town. If they did, it would look much like this;


Page 16 of The Underworld & Wilderness Adventures has a movement table showing just how many hexes a day players can travel in the wilderness. If it wasn't in that guide, we would just extrapolate and estimate movement using the table as a basis. Here is the actual hex map of the Kingdoms of Tefi & Saryn;

Quote from: Telarus;1013878Did you have any procedures, either prep or at-the-table, that you or the group would go through to mediate travel over the map? Did the procedure change if the travel was along a "well known/well marked" route, or between points that the party has previously visited often? While traveling into "unexplored" territory? How much view did the players have to the maps? Did they have to make their own?

(Anyone can feel free to answer these questions! )

For travel into unknown territory in the Wilderlands I use a slightly less detailed version of GameDaddy's above - bit of colour, maybe some legends of the vicinity, describe what PCs can see, encounter checks and recently-were-here checks. Encounters I use a 6 on d6, roll a few times a day, then either select from nearest NPCs/monsters or roll on a table. These days I mostly use a d20 table based off donjon prerolled encounters from http://donjon.bin.sh/fantasy/random/#type=encounter;enc-type=Road - most of those are non hostile encounters and IMO beat the "Manticore jumps out! Bugbears jump out!" approach encouraged by the 1e DMG & MM2 AD&D charts and other monster-heavy charts, though even there using a 2d6 Reaction check can produce something interesting.
I always roll checks in the open, players love/dread seeing that 6 come up with preternatural frequency.

I like to roll weather daily, pretty much given up on weather generators though. I use a d8 so the players know it's not an encounter check; 1 = really bad (or cold, stormy) weather, 8 = really good (or dry, sunny). Also use d8 for direction of wind, 1 = north; may modify if there is an obvious prevailing wind.

I will also use "Indiana Jones red line on the map" approach "3 days later you arrive" at times to abstract travel - almost never in Wilderlands, but in a big largely undetailed world like Forgotten Realms or Greyhawk it can be necessary. I have done it in Wilderlands when I really wanted to skip the road travel between two known locales, but have tended to regret it.

Maps - especially in known territory, but very often otherwise, I usually show players the hex map I'm using, as well a describing what they see. I generally find players are short of info & it helps to give them plenty. I also find the idea of fantasy PCs marking hex maps in-game a bit weird.

Very few people ever actually used this map, in terms of the larger history of D&D. But it basically laid the ground for the entire history of hexmaps.

I was inspired by the Outdoor Survival question so I used part of the map for my next Star Wars adventure.

[ATTACH=CONFIG]2025[/ATTACH]

Because I could.

Thank you guys for the clear descriptions of how overland travel goes down at your table. Anyone else who has similar procedures please feel free to post them.

Quote from: Larsdangly;1013573It's a shame the whole idea behind the super-detailed outdoor hex crawl hasn't gotten more love. A really granular outdoor map plus a page or two of rules for movement, exhaustion, food and water, etc. can be a fresh take on the dungeon crawl, with all sorts of new opportunities for terrain, traps, encounters, environmental challenges, etc. Unfortunately, the idea seems to have withered on the vine and most overland travel gets treated in a very vague way.

Well it's not an RPG but "Source of the Nile" (an old AH board game) did a great job of capturing the feel (if not details).

Quote from: jeff37923;1013732Mind if I use this image format for my own games? I can easily use that as a steppingstone from squares to hexes.

Hi Jeff, off-set squares are equivalent to hexes for game purposes.  Moved to off-set squares for battle mat mapping indoors while still retaining same distance between each square.