Despite decades of gaming, I've never run a hexcrawl.  From the outside looking in, it seems like a nifty way to compartmentalize the flow of a game, and so, I'm curious as to how experienced hexcrawl DMs run it.  Please note that I hand draw maps and am asking questions in that light, with the presumption of a starting village and the game progress to include exploring the surrounding hexes.

What size of hex works best?  Just playing around with it, a 1 inch hex looks best to my eyes.  But that leaves a fair amount of geographical territory mapped out on the paper per hex.  Does it work better to use smaller hexes (say 3 or 4 to the inch) such that each hex contains less geographical detail?

In conjunction with the size of a hex, what scale works best?  The Darlene Greyhawk maps have 30 miles per hex, but that seems far too large for a single hex easily has dozens of unmarked villages with thousands of inhabitants.

What is the best way to present the exploration of the hexes to the players?  Give them a fully drawn map?  Give them a blank hex page and draw it in as they explore, perhaps already having mountain ranges marked as that would be visible from the starting village?

When populating the hexes, how many things do you generally put per hex?  Do you focus upon demographic fidelity to the in your key, or do you just put the interesting places without worrying about demographics?

What is the best way to number the key?  Darlene style with numbers and letters across the sides and top?  Individually putting the key number in each hex?

Not sure of the size off hand but this is the paper I've settled on - http://d7.pipemaze.com/blog/tags/hexcrawl. It works well with 6-mile hexes as explained in this article - In Praise of the Six Mile Hex.

I give the group a mostly blank hex map with a small local starting area filled in and let them do the rest as they explore.

Populating hexes: I just eyeball it mostly. I guess I try to place something interesting within 4-8 hexes of each populated hex, maybe a little less. It can be a lot of work filling these things out. Reliance on good encounter charts and small dungeons/lairs/etc that you can place anywhere helps cut back a lot on the initial workload.

Much of what I've learned about hexcrawling I owe to Rob Conley and other online personalities who will hopefully be along to help you out in more detail.

Before deciding on a hex scale, determine how large an area your sandbox will be. It could be a nation, or a whole continent. The larger the overall area, the smaller you want the scale to be on the overview map.

For Greyhawk, 30 miles per hex works for the large view. The larger your overall area the more layers of detail maps will be needed. You will find that different scale maps of the same areas will be helpful. Its kind of like plotting out a trip on Google maps. You start zoomed out to see the basic route. Moving closer to the destination you zoom in to get more detail such as nearby street names and landmarks.

For my own world, I started with an overview map of 24 miles per hex. Next I made an inset map of the freehold area where the campaign action starts. This was done at 6 miles per hex and shows a bit more detail.

The next map was of one particular freehold and the immediate surroundings at 1 mile per hex. Marked on this map were places of interest such as the largest village, and keep of the freehold. These areas in turn got thier own maps.

Each map has its own use. For eyeballing travel time to a distant land, the 24 mile hex map is handy. General exploration of the freehold areas uses the 6 mile hex map. Adventuring in the starting freehold uses the 1 mile hex map or the ones for the town, keep, or other sites of interest as needed.

I always love using the bigger scales.  It gives you time to fill in the smaller scales as necessity demands, later on.

RPGPundit

Sorry for the belated reply.

I written extensively on Sandbox campaign and hexcrawl settings.

Most of my post are found under two labels on my blog

Managing Sandbox Campaigns
Sandbox Fantasy

Hope this helps and I am glad to answer questions.

To be really brief, a hexcrawl game is the sum of the following:

• A hex map: I prefer 20 km (~12 miles) to a hex, fairly generously seeded with interesting content. This is not as finely detailed as some people prefer, and terrain types invariably get mashed together, but it means the keyed encounters aren't "hidden" among several empty hexes. Numbered hexes are a must for me, since they allow easy reference on a key.
  
• Navigation mechanics: I use a simple 3x3 precalculated table by terrain type (light, medium and hard) and method of travel (afoot, mounted, ship and fast ship), giving you the number of hexes you can travel every day. Some people prefer vector-based travel, and even "hide" the real hexes from their players. Some have hard rules for visibility, some don't.
  
• Encounter mechanics: I roll random 1:6 encounters once per hex, and one to three times per night based on how well the characters have hidden for the night (I always roll three times, once per guard shift, but some of these rolls are "false" if the camp site is secure). Other people figure spotting distance and visibility in here, but I rarely bother - you can also roll surprise rolls if you prefer.
  
• Survival mechanics: I generally don't bother to do more than track food and supplies, and let players deal with the occasional environmental hazard/navigation challenge, but other people have pretty sophisticated systems for this.
  
• Exploration mechanics: Do the characters find the contents of a hex? I rarely complicate this, since I want my players to find those ruins, lairs and encounters if they bump into them, unless they are purposely hidden. But some people like to add this layer to the game.
  

As you can see, the complexity for wilderness travel and exploration can go from a "board game" to a "survival game". I am much closer to running it as the former, but you can easily layer on different mechanics for your group's preferred level of complexity.

In practice, here is how a part of one of my hex maps looks:

Spoiler

GM map showing keyed ruins (x) and lairs (L):


Player map (with what they have discovered so far):

...and here are some random keyed hex descriptions (not all of them from this map). I'd recommend reading that whole thread since it shows how differently a bunch of different people do things. I mostly focus on the strange stuff and don't bother that much with accurate demographics and such - which doesn't mean my hexcrawls are thoughtless, just that they don't try very hard to be realistic.

Interesting comments.  Thank y'all.  I like the different thoughts on the scale ot use.  Particularly nifty seeing different styles on writing the key.

I can see where the hex structure adds a couple different functions that I haven't had with my typical method of using a blank page upon which to draw a map.

Measuring travel distance without resort to a ruler.  Simple and straightforward.

Forcing the DM to densely populate the map.  Without using hexes, it is easy to not place much in between the settlements and major locations.  The hexes make you look at a particular patch of land and ponder what might be there.

Random encounter structure.  Gives a set structure for rolling when entering a hex or whatnot.

What other functions does the hex structure add to play over and above simply using a blank page to map?  Do players have more of a sense of discovery when going to see what in in XYZ hex?

Can anyone help me out with the various math?

Like if I want a large "world map" with 24 mile or 30 mile hexes

How can those be broken down into "subhexes" for area maps?

And how can those subhexes be broken down into sub-sub hexes for detail maps?

I suck at math and just need a nice simple progression.



EDIT: I made a large region in Hexographer and would like to "zoom in" on an area and need to know how to do that :/

Because I recently read another thread about running an impromptu hexcrawl (terrain and world generated during play, sketchbox style, instead of before play, sandbox style,) I've been reading, testing, and reviewing a couple published hexcrawl systems, which might be of interest. I've done brief reviews of the DMG's terrain generation system and Kellri's modification from the Old School Encounters Reference. I have some scheduled in the future for Judges Guild and three from Fight On!

Quote from: Piestrio;626562Can anyone help me out with the various math?

Like if I want a large "world map" with 24 mile or 30 mile hexes

How can those be broken down into "subhexes" for area maps?

And how can those subhexes be broken down into sub-sub hexes for detail maps?

I suck at math and just need a nice simple progression.

I've seen a table in Kellri's CDD #4 that works out math for hexes of various size.

But here's what I suggest. I like a hex that breaks down into smaller hexes such that the larger hex is 5 smaller hexes wide. Like this:



Now, I use two-league hexes for my local maps. That's either 5 miles or 6 miles (I use 5 miles, but the beauty of the league is it's based on travel time on foot, so it can be either 2.5 or 3 miles, whichever you prefer.) That means my next larger hex should be 10 leagues (25 to 30 miles, basically the size of a barony) and the one above that would be 50 leagues (125 to 150 miles.) It takes more than a fortnight to travel across one of the largest hexes, so that should be fine for your "world" map.

Quote from: talysman;626569I've seen a table in Kellri's CDD #4 that works out math for hexes of various size.

But here's what I suggest. I like a hex that breaks down into smaller hexes such that the larger hex is 5 smaller hexes wide. Like this:



Now, I use two-league hexes for my local maps. That's either 5 miles or 6 miles (I use 5 miles, but the beauty of the league is it's based on travel time on foot, so it can be either 2.5 or 3 miles, whichever you prefer.) That means my next larger hex should be 10 leagues (25 to 30 miles, basically the size of a barony) and the one above that would be 50 leagues (125 to 150 miles.) It takes more than a fortnight to travel across one of the largest hexes, so that should be fine for your "world" map.

That works perfect Thanks.

So my island will be 30 mile hexes, I can zoom in with 5 mile hexes for the regions and really zoom in with 1 mile hexes for the detail maps.

My suggestions:

1) Keep in mind there is a big difference between "travel through a hex" and "exploring a hex" and express this to players.

2) Visualize your terrain. Imagine its history. Immerse yourself in the places as much as possible to bring it all to life.

3) The PCs probably aren't the first people to travel here so NPCs will be useful fonts of knowledge, rumors, myths and outright lies. So give some thought to those entries on the random encounter charts.

4) Build your map to the interests of your players. What do they hope to find? Lots of dungeons, towns for trade, weird magical places? What do they enjoy most? Make sure there is a liberal sprinkling to keep them happy.

5) Tailor the map to your setting and campaign. The cool bits found should reinforce the themes of the world. AKA, if your campaign has an Arthurian flavor, your hexcrawl discoveries should be different than if your campaign has a Lovecraftian flavor.

6) I'll pimp an article I wrote for Knockspell 3 that was a random ruin generator that I use for my hexcrawls. I am a big fan of civilization layered upon civilization so my hex crawls have lots of ruins.