How big an area do you feel is appropriate for a fantasy Hex Crawl?

Quote from: Silverlion;516095How big an area do you feel is appropriate for a fantasy Hex Crawl?

I been told that the coverage of the map for Blackmarsh and my Points of Light books was fine. The maps cover 135 miles by 95 miles. 27 hex columns by 19 hex rows. It was enough to complete a phase of the campaign before the players moved on to another area.

The work you have increases by the square of the hex rows and columns you pick to detail. Not the scale of the map itself.  Doubling the size of of one of my PoL maps means four times the work. It takes about 20 hours to do a rough draft of a PoL map. The Wild North, Wilderlands size, was about 40 hours.

Quote from: Silverlion;516095How big an area do you feel is appropriate for a fantasy Hex Crawl?

My hexcrawl is 16 x 16 hexes (with 12-mile hexes). But it features a design "error" due to legacy issues: There are two population centers which PCs are based out of.

Looking at the historical usage patterns of either population center independently, I would say a 10 x 10 map would provide more than enough coverage (while more than halving the number of hexes you need to key).

(In terms of necessary content, I could easily get by with a 7 x 7 or even 6 x 6 map. But those would carry a significant likelihood of the PCs randomly wandering off the edge of the map.)

It depends on the density of interesting adventure sites, civilisation hubs and wilderness encounters. If they are far away from each other, you will need a larger map, while if they are seeded generously, even a smaller area is enough to generate and sustain the emerging complexity of a sandbox setting.

I got a lot of mileage out of an approximately 20*16 area with a peninsula, a handful of off-coast islands (some with ruins and mini-dungeons, some with independent mini-kingdoms) and two notable towns. I used that over multiple campaign arcs, first as a site for more traditional adventuring, then as a site for heist stories and ultimately domain management for a breakaway gang of evil-leaning PCs. The players were pretty good at connecting the dots I set up for them, and didn't see even half of the stuff which was scattered around (some more detailed, some less).

Of course, you can start with the starting area and easily come up with much of the rest later.

30 x 30 miles is roughly one county in many states. Imagine how many villages, towns, and cities are found in a 4 county block? Imagine having to either ride a horse or walk that area, especially if it's hilly and wooded.

How many hexes you want will depend on a bunch of factors. How big are your hexes? What's the terrain/population like? The denser it is, the fewer hexes you'll need.

For my wilderness exploration campaign I mapped up a 80x60 hex area, though I left most of that completely void of details for now (It's intended to give me room to expand as the PCs reach higher levels, and I hope to use a lot of this prep for multiple campaigns). I've come up with some details on a roughly 30x30 hex area, which is what my PCs have currently been exploring.

However, my hexes are only 3 miles each. it's intended to be a game of wilderness exploration, in an area with very few settlements. I only have an actual feature in about 1/10th of the hexes or less. If your area is densely settled and you're planning something in almost every hex, I'd imagine you'd need dramatically fewer hexes.

I always go big. Epic actually. I want the players to feel immersed in the world. One way to do that is to give them plenty of locations to travel to and explore. My newest world Falchodas is almost 5,000 miles in diameter... I do localized Hex maps for this one...



Tal'Chernan Color


 

The Continent of Ashavergath created in 1999 is 1,750 miles by 2,500 miles, so about 70% the size of the U.S. Scale is 5 miles to the hex





Ashavergath Political Map

Nice GD

In my D&D campaign I used Mystara. All of it. Inside and out. Why should there be a space limit?

RPGPundit

I'm finding that the Yggsburgh Eastmark 30x50 miles is about ideal for a rural area, at 1 hex/mile. My Loudwater primary area map is also 30x50 miles at 2 miles/hex.  Conversely my Wilderlands game has 15 mile hexes, but it's mostly plains and PCs ride the wide open spaces.

Quote from: RPGPundit;516489In my D&D campaign I used Mystara. All of it. Inside and out. Why should there be a space limit?

Because some of us are building our own settings, bottom-up?

Quote from: RPGPundit;516489In my D&D campaign I used Mystara. All of it. Inside and out. Why should there be a space limit?

RPGPundit

Mostly for mapping purposes for a free "variant" product for High Valor. An alternate setting with tons of more standard fantasy materials. Mostly to try out Hexcrawl style play without needing D&D or D&Dlikes. I've an adventure I wrote a long time ago to playtest ideas, and it works best with Hexcrawling since characters come from a different age in the world.

So I wanted to know what others thought reasonable map and location size is before I say "Go for it GM's!"

Quote from: RPGPundit;516489In my D&D campaign I used Mystara. All of it. Inside and out. Why should there be a space limit?

I don't think anybody's talking about imposing some kind of maximum cap space. But having some idea what the minimum or typical "body of prep" is for a particular type of campaign is useful information.

Without that information, for example, I overestimated by 150%. That's a lot of extraneous prep that I could have foregone (which would have let me start playing sooner).

As far as minimum size for a good hexcrawl setting: for rural dungeon-delving and adventuring with the whole area well-detailed I'd suggest 30 miles across, or 1 World of Greyhawk hex.  Eg: create a base town, then detail out 10-20 miles in all directions from the town at 1 mile per hex.  It's then a practical matter to detail all the major NPC and sites, Yggsburgh-style, and create a milieu suitable for say 6-8 levels of adventuring.  If high-level PCs outgrow the locale you can then expand it outwards, perhaps a new map at 5, 6 or 8 miles to the hex.

I find that 24-mile or 30-mile hexes create no real 'sense of place' and are only useful as a world overview, not for hexcrawling where PCs interact with the environment at ground level.

Quote from: S'mon;516684I find that 24-mile or 30-mile hexes create no real 'sense of place' and are only useful as a world overview, not for hexcrawling where PCs interact with the environment at ground level.

Or as I call it the howling emptiness of the thirty mile hex. It was the main reason I jumped from Greyhawk to the Wilderlands.

But to honest much of it was due to my relative inexperience. I was only in Junior High School at the time (9th grade). Still like the Spinward Marches of Traveller it was way easier to get starter with Wilderlands than with Greyhawk.