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It's not that hexcrawling isn't great, because hexcrawling is pretty great, but it's a pretty broad scale. I think we can say with certainty that a five or six mile hex is getting a cursory-at-best examination and only the most notable landmarks are going to factor into navigating its wilderness.

But why should it be so? Is there not a place for combing the forest, taking note of small landmarks like statues, grassy knolls, and unusual-shaped trees? Heck, Skyrim had plenty of fun wilderness exploration and the whole thing (if one assumes it's to exact scale) comfortably fits into a hex. My understanding is the famous West Marches campaign was conducted on a small scale of wilderness like this, were lessons learned from it?

I've been pointed in the direction of Hill Cantons's "Pointcrawl" post and had a couple Fighting Fantasy and Chivalry & Sorcery adventures pointed out to me, but I'd love to hear more thoughts or be directed to more inspirational reading.

A tight-scale wilderness adventure would be a bit like a dungeon adventure except outside. You could make a similar kinda map, etc. Of course it's still more open-ended (unless say the area's got totally horrible tangled thorny growths everywhere save winding paths and there's huge gloomy dark trees everywhere making the place constant twilight country save in small clearings...in wich case what you got is a dungeon for all practical purposes :)).

Check out "The Hill" from B5.

I ran that wilderness crawl for a group for months and it's pretty small.

Quote from: LibraryLass;684039It's not that hexcrawling isn't great, because hexcrawling is pretty great, but it's a pretty broad scale. I think we can say with certainty that a five or six mile hex is getting a cursory-at-best examination and only the most notable landmarks are going to factor into navigating its wilderness.

There is no rule that a hex equals 5 miles.

The hexcrawl format can be used to represent continents, regions, and small regions. I have a variety of hex maps at different scales.

http://batintheattic.blogspot.com/2010/01/gormmah-region-and-settlement-patterns.html


(http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_mFjy4EWzmtg/S2JmRY5kMII/AAAAAAAAAuA/FyPnnsFxW6A/s320/Campaign+Map+Sm2.jpg)

(http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_mFjy4EWzmtg/S2JmRso-NEI/AAAAAAAAAuI/9W0k5mpWaIU/s320/Region,+Gormmah+Sm.jpg)

Judges Guild had a system where they broke down a 5 mile hex into .2 miles hex and finally to 42 feet hexes. It was used in their Wilderness series (Mines of Custalon, Spies of Lightelf, etc).

Here is a blog post of mine that goes into the ins and outs of mapping with hexes.

http://batintheattic.blogspot.com/2008/10/mapping-with-hexes.html

Quote from: Piestrio;684059Check out "The Hill" from B5.

I ran that wilderness crawl for a group for months and it's pretty small.

Of course! How could I forget Horror on the Hill? That's just the sort of adventure I want to run! Thanks, man.

Quote from: estar;684060There is no rule that a hex equals 5 miles.

The hexcrawl format can be used to represent continents, regions, and small regions. I have a variety of hex maps at different scales.

snip

Judges Guild had a system where they broke down a 5 mile hex into .2 miles hex and finally to 42 feet hexes. It was used in their Wilderness series (Mines of Custalon, Spies of Lightelf, etc).

Here is a blog post of mine that goes into the ins and outs of mapping with hexes.

http://batintheattic.blogspot.com/2008/10/mapping-with-hexes.html

As usual, Conley, you're a goddamned prince. This is some keen stuff.

1 mile hexes should be a good compromise; it's what I used for a recent scrubcrawl with lots of little features. That reminds me, also, to get my d20 "wilderness encounters and features" system out there; brambles, pests, hazards, food, etc.

Quote from: Roger the GS;6840731 mile hexes should be a good compromise; it's what I used for a recent scrubcrawl with lots of little features. That reminds me, also, to get my d20 "wilderness encounters and features" system out there; brambles, pests, hazards, food, etc.

Yeah, 1 mile might do. I did just get my hands on Thunder Rift recently, and I believe that's what the map in that uses.

I'd like very much to see that system. I always find something useful on your blog.

Quote from: LibraryLass;684067Of course! How could I forget Horror on the Hill? That's just the sort of adventure I want to run! Thanks, man.

The particular changes I made to make it last longer were:

1. Made returning to town easier so that it could be a base from which they could explore.

2. little direction re. the ruined monastery. One player got one rumor, this left them less likely to bee-line to the back of the map to find the dungeon and more likely to explore the hill.

I rarely if ever use hexes these days for a couple of reasons: the kind of bird's eye top down ordnance survey level maps involved were rarely if ever available at the tech level that most fantasy games operate at, and it creates a neat compartmentalisation which can be at odds with the feeling of being in the wilderness/great outdoors.

I would describe the areas the group are travelling through, random encounters would include things like broken down cottages and other nonthreatening but atmosphere building scenery as well as beasties, they can point to where they are on the map approximately, and I roll up random more important scenes depending on the area they are in. All of which conspire to create a more natural feeling exploration experience.

Plus when lost nobody can say, well at least we know we're lost in this hex - when you're lost you're good and lost.

Quote from: The Traveller;684090I rarely if ever use hexes these days for a couple of reasons: the kind of bird's eye top down ordnance survey level maps involved were rarely if ever available at the tech level that most fantasy games operate at, and it creates a neat compartmentalisation which can be at odds with the feeling of being in the wilderness/great outdoors.

I would describe the areas the group are travelling through, random encounters would include things like broken down cottages and other nonthreatening but atmosphere building scenery as well as beasties, they can point to where they are on the map approximately, and I roll up random more important scenes depending on the area they are in. All of which conspire to create a more natural feeling exploration experience.

Plus when lost nobody can say, well at least we know we're lost in this hex - when you're lost you're good and lost.

The hex map is more for the GM. You can always have the players make their maps on plain paper with eyeballed distances approximated. When the players get lost the GM needs to know which hex they are in, but you are correct in that the players do not need to be aware of hexes at all.

Quote from: Exploderwizard;684094The hex map is more for the GM. You can always have the players make their maps on plain paper with eyeballed distances approximated. When the players get lost the GM needs to know which hex they are in, but you are correct in that the players do not need to be aware of hexes at all.

That's kind of the beauty of it though - technically the GM doesn't need a proper map at all with this system, just blobs drawn on a sheet to indicate which area is next to which, like the Greydust Drylands, the Nightwatch Woods, the Sable Sea coast, the Anvil Mountains etc.

Each area so delineated comes with a variety of attached information, such as danger, communities, how hard it is to get lost, descriptions, random encounter tables both atmospheric and otherwise, and actual locations. The GM doesn't need to know where these locations are on a map in an exploration game, and only approximately otherwise ("three days ride to the north you will find the Monastery of Clay").

Once the GM knows what area they are in, and what state they are in (lost or otherwise, two days into their journey, etc) it's possible to run such games in a very freeform manner. I like large scale maps but I'd only ever use them as a rough guideline, villages and burial mounds pop up out of nowhere all over the place when the PCs hit the road. I wouldn't use maps for cities or dungeons at all.

Quote from: The Traveller;684098That's kind of the beauty of it though - technically the GM doesn't need a proper map at all with this system, just blobs drawn on a sheet to indicate which area is next to which, like the Greydust Drylands, the Nightwatch Woods, the Sable Sea coast, the Anvil Mountains etc.

Each area so delineated comes with a variety of attached information, such as danger, communities, how hard it is to get lost, descriptions, random encounter tables both atmospheric and otherwise, and actual locations. The GM doesn't need to know where these locations are on a map in an exploration game, and only approximately otherwise ("three days ride to the north you will find the Monastery of Clay").

Once the GM knows what area they are in, and what state they are in (lost or otherwise, two days into their journey, etc) it's possible to run such games in a very freeform manner. I like large scale maps but I'd only ever use them as a rough guideline, villages and burial mounds pop up out of nowhere all over the place when the PCs hit the road. I wouldn't use maps for cities or dungeons at all.

I enjoy drawing maps way too much to roll that way. I can understand the method if mapmaking is something you don't enjoy.

You can run a wilderness game as a series of trails among visible or hidden landmarks. A trail can also mean anything - from walking along a dirt track to following a river or ridge. This is not incompatible with hexes; you still find these landmarks in a hex-crawl (unless it is a very abstracted, macro-level one), the players just have an additional, basic six-direction ''interface'' for free navigation.

I'd still use a hex overlay for measuring travel times (which is quite handy for encounter checks), but otherwise, a network map is quite sufficient for a self-contained area.

Quote from: Exploderwizard;684102I enjoy drawing maps way too much to roll that way. I can understand the method if mapmaking is something you don't enjoy.

I like making maps, here's one I drew along the lines of the old Lone Wolf gamebooks:

(http://s11.postimg.org/unjxph837/closemap2.jpg)

There are many features not visible there which the group will come across, it's left loose deliberately. I have a list of information for each region on the map and use it whenever the group enters that region.

Say they want to cut from Kalrack over to Bazshurk on an important courier mission, they spy smoke from campfires off in the distance and scout it out. It's a large party of Gomorr (bronze age gorilla-man raiders loosely based on Beastmen from Warhammer, bad news), so they cut south into the Barrowmoors. Here they come across a demon haunted monolith that's not on any map, but which gives access to a huge series of underground burial catacombs built by the Ones who Came Before, if they can outwit the near-senile guardian.

Lacking a GPS unit the best they can do is try to fix the location in their heads, unless they want to go raiding on the spot and risk the wrath of the feared Duke of Kalrack by being even later than they already are with his message. They may find it again or they may not, but all they really know is that it's somewhere on the moors.

I'm not hopping from hex to hex here, just letting the game unfold as it unfolds according to the group and the dice. You can certainly use hexes to get the same effect, but laying hexes over the top of that would break up the freeform feel for me - plus I don't have to hide a map from the group while I fill in the blanks. Even political boundaries aren't marked out, the allegiance of each major settlement is indicated by the colour of their roof on the map.

Not saying it's a suitable playstyle for everyone but the shoe seems to fit me.

Cities likewise, it's hard for a group to get lost when they have a top down view of the place and can pinpoint their location to a given alley at any given time. Blobs are better for atmosphere in my experience.

Quote from: The Traveller;684135I like making maps, here's one I drew along the lines of the old Lone Wolf gamebooks:

(http://s11.postimg.org/unjxph837/closemap2.jpg)

There are many features not visible there which the group will come across, it's left loose deliberately. I have a list of information for each region on the map and use it whenever the group enters that region.

Say they want to cut from Kalrack over to Bazshurk on an important courier mission, they spy smoke from campfires off in the distance and scout it out. It's a large party of Gomorr (bronze age gorilla-man raiders loosely based on Beastmen from Warhammer, bad news), so they cut south into the Barrowmoors. Here they come across a demon haunted monolith that's not on any map, but which gives access to a huge series of underground burial catacombs built by the Ones who Came Before, if they can outwit the near-senile guardian.

Lacking a GPS unit the best they can do is try to fix the location in their heads, unless they want to go raiding on the spot and risk the wrath of the feared Duke of Kalrack by being even later than they already are with his message. They may find it again or they may not, but all they really know is that it's somewhere on the moors.

I'm not hopping from hex to hex here, just letting the game unfold as it unfolds according to the group and the dice. You can certainly use hexes to get the same effect, but laying hexes over the top of that would break up the freeform feel for me - plus I don't have to hide a map from the group while I fill in the blanks. Even political boundaries aren't marked out, the allegiance of each major settlement is indicated by the colour of their roof on the map.

Not saying it's a suitable playstyle for everyone but the shoe seems to fit me.

Cities likewise, it's hard for a group to get lost when they have a top down view of the place and can pinpoint their location to a given alley at any given time. Blobs are better for atmosphere in my experience.

I like that map. Hexes are cool as a GM eyeball tool but as long as you have a scale then you really don't need them any more than you need a grid to use minis for combat.

It depends on the game as well.

I don't think it is particularly LibraryLass's thing, but many SFRPGs use hex maps for their stellar mapping. Traveller started this tradition and it caught on, but stellar mapping allows you to drill down easily. A system in a hex only has a finite number of planets, smaller objects can exist as well and depending on your detection equipment and the signature it has - those smaller objects may be nearly impossible to find.

You could have BDOs for Players to explore literally hidden in plain sight because at distance, an unpowered and cold spaceship wreck looks like a metal rich asteroid at a distance.

At one point, I referred to this scale of wilderness travel as "subhexcrawl (http://9and30kingdoms.blogspot.com/2012/01/subhexcrawl.html)". I figured 120-yard hexes would be appropriate: travel 5 hexes per hour, including ten minutes of rest. I started doing some random tools for generating subhex terrain (http://9and30kingdoms.blogspot.com/search/label/subhex) on the fly, but I'll probably re-do them (started incorporating them into my general random sketchbox tools, actually.)

The Judges Guild also had some terrain generation tables aimed at a sub-mile wilderness scale.

I think a combination "landmark and path" approach would work:

 - Think about major landmarks that travelers could see from far away: hills, unusually tall trees, mostly-intact towers, stand of woods, etc.
 - Think about settlements next: where you start, any nearby hamlets or homesteads/farms.
 - Place roads connecting settlements and other man-made structures, perhaps including bends and kinks.
 - Place minor landmarks, like smaller mounds, burnt-out trees, cairns, notable boulders, royal milemarkers, or signposts, at most if not all of the bends and kinks in the roads.
 - Scatter a few other landmarks/points of interest off the beaten path. There may or may not be marked trails to these points of interest.

Place any of these manually or randomly, as desired.

I never thought to look back in your blog, Talysman. Good advice from you as I've come to expect.

Quote from: jeff37923;684152It depends on the game as well.

I don't think it is particularly LibraryLass's thing, but many SFRPGs use hex maps for their stellar mapping. Traveller started this tradition and it caught on, but stellar mapping allows you to drill down easily. A system in a hex only has a finite number of planets, smaller objects can exist as well and depending on your detection equipment and the signature it has - those smaller objects may be nearly impossible to find.

You could have BDOs for Players to explore literally hidden in plain sight because at distance, an unpowered and cold spaceship wreck looks like a metal rich asteroid at a distance.

I prefer fantasy generally, but I do like making space maps.

Another bit of inspiration for you, if you can find it, would be Jacquays' "The Enchanted Wood" for Dragonquest. Its a moderately weird 'outdoor dungeon' type of adventure with quite a few alternate paths/adventure hooks & entry points.

Quote from: LibraryLass;684263I never thought to look back in your blog, Talysman. Good advice from you as I've come to expect.

I decided to follow up today with an actual post:

SubHexCrawl Re-visited (http://9and30kingdoms.blogspot.com/2013/08/subhexcrawl-re-visited.html)

Mostly, it's just a re-statement of what I posted earlier in the thread, with a little more thought about the steps to accomplish this. I do, however, suggest rolling for whether there's a landmark at any given twist or turn along a path, sort of like a dungeon stocking roll.

I'll have another post about getting lost or stumbling across other landmarks while traveling off the beaten path tomorrow.

Experience has taught me that my gaming groups tend not to be very interested in crawling through the minutia of wilderness movement.

RPGPundit

I prefer small hexes and small worlds. A 10x10 mile island could easily be an amazing campaign setting as much as a massive world. Remember that without roads and a place full of monsters, travel is going to be slow and paranoid.

I tend to map the areas around and to-and-from my adventure areas quite heavily.  My Steel Isle Campaign, which was online, had a very fluid and changing wilderness, with many prime sects and organizations.

I have recently heard The One Ring RPG has some interesting ideas to run wilderness adventures. So, tell me about them. :) Good, bad, indifferent, swinish?

Quote from: Melan;686842I have recently heard The One Ring RPG has some interesting ideas to run wilderness adventures. So, tell me about them. :) Good, bad, indifferent, swinish?

I have it and read it, but not played it.  There's two maps of the same area- one is the player's map and the other the GM's.  The difference between the two is that the gm's map has a hex overlay and is color coded by terrain type.  The player's plot their travel on their map and the gm is able to determine what terrain they are going through and what rolls the player's need to make.  My memory is a bit foggy on it at the moment.

Quote from: RunningLaser;686844I have it and read it, but not played it.  There's two maps of the same area- one is the player's map and the other the GM's.  The difference between the two is that the gm's map has a hex overlay and is color coded by terrain type.  The player's plot their travel on their map and the gm is able to determine what terrain they are going through and what rolls the player's need to make.  My memory is a bit foggy on it at the moment.

That's not a particularly new idea.

Thanks for the info!

So it is basically the Judges Guild campaign hexagon system, except the players don't get a hex overlay. Makes an amount of sense, since the game is set in the Wilderland -- that is, the original one from Middle Earth. :)

Whenever I use hex maps, I take a map and overlay hexes onto it. That way, I get the ease of using hexes for travel and the flexibility of having different features within hexes.

Hexes do not have to be "All plains" or "All forest", they can be a mix of terrain types, can have towns, ruins, towers, caves or whatever as well as the terrain beneath it.

Yeah; this is one of the downsides of the popularity of Hexographer and the BXCM "Known World". Even Darlene's Greyhawk map, as good as it is, has too homogenous terrain, when things are rarely so clear-cut.

Quote from: LibraryLass;684039It's not that hexcrawling isn't great, because hexcrawling is pretty great, but it's a pretty broad scale. I think we can say with certainty that a five or six mile hex is getting a cursory-at-best examination and only the most notable landmarks are going to factor into navigating its wilderness.

Good hexcrawl structures can be scaled to virtually any distance.

A common problem, however, is that people try to embrace a "one true size" for hexcrawls and they end up scaling their maps incorrectly: If a lot of your hexes have multiple points of interest in them, then your hexes are too big. If a lot of your hexes are empty and devoid of interest, on the other hand, your hexes are too small.

(For example, if your hexes are thirty miles across then what you're saying is that you're only interested in features which generally only occur once in 780 square miles -- i.e., bigger and rarer stuff. At that scale, you're not going to be keying individual farm houses or a cave containing two brown bears. OTOH, if you're using hexes that are only one mile across, then you're saying that you ARE interested in things like a cave with a couple of bears in it.)

The big challenge with smaller hexes is handling sight lines. (At least that's true for me as a GM.)

It should also be noted that the hexcrawl structure is really only useful for wilderness exploration. The "Pointcrawl" post you indicated makes the very good point that most travel is usually done along established trails or roads: Using a hexcrawl structure to handle travel along a linear path is generally awkward and inconvenient.

Quote from: Melan;687289Yeah; this is one of the downsides of the popularity of Hexographer and the BXCM "Known World". Even Darlene's Greyhawk map, as good as it is, has too homogenous terrain, when things are rarely so clear-cut.

This comes back to using hexes of the wrong size: The whole point of using a hex is, in fact, to homogenize or average out the features within the hex into a more manageable unit that can be handled as a mechanical whole. When you find yourself trying to figure out exactly where things are within an individual hex it's a huge warning sign that your map is at the wrong scale.

Talking of small scale adventures; when I was up in the Grampian mountains last week my son and I ended up in a bog called the Moss of Essie, after I'd carried him over a stream/small river called the Kirkney Water (we'd tried crossing via a fallen tree that crossed the stream, but it broke when we were halfway over, nearly pitched us in). The bog had looked like regular ground until we were in it, then it just got worse and worse - took us an hour to go about a hundred yards through the bog and finally get to the higher ground on the other side. This all within a mile or so of the house we were staying at.
Gave me new respect for the wilderness movement rules in B2: Keep on the Borderlands. :D