Rob Conley's Blackmarsh (or its precursor, the Rorystone Road download) are about the correct scale. These are large enough to make travel distances meaningful, but small enough to make everyone seem to be part of the neighbourhood. However, you are correct - you could also create something like Scorpion Swamp (or the inferior Forest of Doom) as a pointcrawl, and build from that.

One of my friends had a Sorcery! campaign going; he had mapped out the whole area from the Shamutanti Hills to Mampang on one hex sheet, and it was pretty successful. Unfortunately, he never published his notes, which were in Hungarian anyway.

Quote from: Melan;1031104Rob Conley's Blackmarsh (or its precursor, the Rorystone Road download) are about the correct scale. These are large enough to make travel distances meaningful, but small enough to make everyone seem to be part of the neighbourhood. However, you are correct - you could also create something like Scorpion Swamp (or the inferior Forest of Doom) as a pointcrawl, and build from that.

One of my friends had a Sorcery! campaign going; he had mapped out the whole area from the Shamutanti Hills to Mampang on one hex sheet, and it was pretty successful. Unfortunately, he never published his notes, which were in Hungarian anyway.

I think I am going to have to do it myself... I think to start maybe I'll take a small area of wilderness IMC, just a few miles across, and try mapping it out more like it was an above-ground dungeon. Forest with trails, clearings, overgrown ruins etc in the Forest of Doom style seems like a good prospect. Wooded hills might be good - caves, cliffs, spots of marshy ground.

Edit: I already use Rob's Barbarian Altanis as my core campaign area, but expanded to 15 miles/hex it needs a lot of drilling down for what I'm thinking of.

The Wormshead Peninsula and the nearby coastal areas on the City State map are pretty good. Independent island-kingdoms, a smaller and a larger city, and a bunch of wilderness. I even added Rappan Athuk to the mix on the seacoast.

Thanks for the shout out folks.

My observation over the past couple of decades of running this stuff is that while my Majestic Wilderlands is organized like a hexcrawl, players explore it like pointcrawl or more accurate a webcrawl. The reason being is that the players generally don't explore by wandering the landscape, they explore by traversing the overlying social network of NPCs and monsters.

For example this is what the players knew about Dearthwood (near City-State) at the beginning. Note small hexes are 1 league (2.5 miles) = 1 hour of walking. Big hexes are 5 leagues (12.5 miles).


[ATTACH=CONFIG]2354[/ATTACH]

Full Map

This is what they wound knowing at one point

[ATTACH=CONFIG]2355[/ATTACH]

Full Map

Why?

That thread of the campaign started with the PCs inadvertently recusing a little girl named Mori. Apparently she considers Maud, a green dragon who lives in Dearthwood, to be a mother figure. I roleplayed the girl is being a bit "off" so the PCs wasn't sure if she was somebody polymorphed, a fae, or what. (Actually she was just a ordinary little girl that the Green Dragon grew to love as a mother). So at the time of this post the party decided to go to Dearthwood and see what up with Mori and possibly return Maud. Because among other things Maud was a known ally of Pan Caulderax.

If you read the rest of the posts, you can see the PCs following the threads from the NPCs and creature they discover.

For the most part, my experience is that playing Source of the Nile in a D&D campaign is a specific taste not shared by many players. And certainly not all the time. It can work but what more interesting to more players is interacting with sentient beings i.e. NPCs. So I try to combine that with adventuring into the unknown. If you look at Blackmarsh and Rorystone Road you will see that many locale point other locales because of the particulars of the NPCs there.

My home made sandbox setting (the Marches of Magdaw) encourages free form wandering in two ways: The default center of the campaign is the court of King Magdaw, who serves as a sort of pagan Arthurian figure, surrounded by a hierarchical gang of henchmen whose status arises largely from errantry. So, if you want to shine you need to get out into the countryside and do something cool. And 2) practically every 1E, BD&D and OSR dungeon you ever heard of, along with stuff I've written, are dappled somewhere across the landscape within a week or so from the court. There must be over 200 mapped dungeons on the map, along with a bunch of surface encounters, wandering personalities and famous monsters, etc. The place is absolutely crawling with stuff to do. So, your PC's really can just head off into the unknown confident they will get rich or famous or dead.

Quote from: Greentongue;1030926It is a well detailed setting with published adventures but no requirement to play those adventures.
There are plenty of adventure hooks everywhere or you can hang your own from the bones provided.
Lots of detail but plenty untouched because it is a huge setting.

You can find a lot of bits and pieces with some searches that will give a good feel for what it is.

It kinda requires Savage Worlds rules but could be mined for other systems, as with most settings.
=

It's pretty broad, but leaves enough room for your own details. To me it has just the right amount of detail. Broad enough to cover all bases, but not so much info that all the blanks are filled. The player's guide has about 15 organisations and the gazetteer has about 15 evil organisations and about 50 different regions. Not too much detail, but enough to give you a clear idea what they are all about.

Froggod Games has a series of Hexcrawl modules: http://froggodgames.org/hex-crawl-chronicles

"It's  wilderness sandbox of areas, encounters and villages that players travel around in. It provides no story line, just hundreds of story hooks and possibilities. An example of what this looks like that I published a few years ago can be found."

I own a few of them, mainly for the random encounter tables. It's standard fare, not very original, but lots of it.

Also, ages ago, you (S'mon) were kind enough to suggest "Vault of Larin Karr" to me (overon EnWorld), which I've come to love and now often suggest to others when the question of a more sandboxy module with parallel plot strands and lots of insular encounters on a map comes up. So, right back atcha, hehe.

Quote from: Jorunkun;1033564Also, ages ago, you (S'mon) were kind enough to suggest "Vault of Larin Karr" to me (overon EnWorld), which I've come to love and now often suggest to others when the question of a more sandboxy module with parallel plot strands and lots of insular encounters on a map comes up. So, right back atcha, hehe.

Thanks

Yeah VoLK is an example of a mini-version of what I'm thinking of.

Honest question:  What do you mean by 'mini-dungeons'?

Quote from: Christopher Brady;1033573Honest question:  What do you mean by 'mini-dungeons'?

I think most folks would use that phrase to describe any kind of underground or building adventure site with 1-10 rooms/sites (give or take). This is the scale of lots of small locale's that get distributed around larger megadungeons (e.g., Barrowmaze or Rappan Athuk have a bunch like this). Dyson's Delves include many such dungeons.

Quote from: S'mon;1031105I think I am going to have to do it myself... I think to start maybe I'll take a small area of wilderness IMC, just a few miles across, and try mapping it out more like it was an above-ground dungeon. Forest with trails, clearings, overgrown ruins etc in the Forest of Doom style seems like a good prospect. Wooded hills might be good - caves, cliffs, spots of marshy ground.

Edit: I already use Rob's Barbarian Altanis as my core campaign area, but expanded to 15 miles/hex it needs a lot of drilling down for what I'm thinking of.

My How to Make a Sandbox has procedures and tips for fleshing out an arbitrary area.

Quote from: Christopher Brady;1033573Honest question:  What do you mean by 'mini-dungeons'?

Stuff like this The Three Brothers Barrows. Or the material in the Harn Pottage Series. Small locales with the potential for a short adventure.

Quote from: estar;1033595Stuff like this The Three Brothers Barrows. Or the material in the Harn Pottage Series. Small locales with the potential for a short adventure.

That doesn't look very mini to me.  But if that's what S'mon meant, it's cool.

Quote from: S'mon;1031098Been going over this since it arrived yesterday. It kinda has the tools to create a West Marches type hexcrawl or pointcrawl sandbox, without being one. The 50 adventures for instance would need to be keyed to an in-game useable map so that the PCs can encounter them by travelling over the map. The only regional map I can find in the book seems purely indicative, not something that could be used to map journeys in play. It mentions more maps online somewhere which I've not googled for yet.

One thing about Ben Robbins' description of West Marches is that it seems to be at a pretty small scale, reminiscent of Forest of Doom or Scorpion Swamp, not the 5+ miles per hex typical of sandbox campaign settings. Something like the 1 mile per hex of the Yggsburgh map seems like about the maximum for this play style, where every bridge, rocky outcrop and fallen log can potentially be meaningful.

Yes the 50 adventures are for dropping wherever the GM chooses, not allocating them on the map was intentional. As you suggest the map is more for rough directions. You could possibly lay a hex over it, but given it's isometric, that might be too fiddly. I tend to steer clear of hexes myself and just eyeball things, then declare "it's about 3 days travel east" etc

Quote from: Christopher Brady;1033573Honest question:  What do you mean by 'mini-dungeons'?

A dungeon intended for use in a single 4 hour game session?