Anyone can complain about the failings of something, but it takes a slightly smarter dumbass to actually propose a solution. My Last Post talked about two common criticisms I have with hexes and how I'd go about fixing them when they're already made. But let's assume for a second that I got off of my high horse and actually wanted to make a hexcrawl instead of write a blog post about one. How would I do that?

Goals, Motives, and Objectives

What makes a good hexcrawl? I've alluded to it already, but I think hexcrawls are good when they're:

• Dense: there should be lots of stuff everywhere!
• Interconnected: Everything should relate to something else in the world.
• Diverse: Don't repeat or rehash things unless you've got a good reason to.

Each of these principles or general goals ought to be true not only for the macro level of the hexcrawl, but for every individual hex taken in a vacuum and each site in the hex. When most people compliment the content of a module or hex, it seems to me like they're harking back to one of these three principles. At the very least, that's the stuff I like about hexcrawls.

We'll go with making one hex, but the process is meant to be done for lots of hexes across a region.

The Process

Research & Development; The Folks I'm Taking Stuff From and the Sources

My method for making hexcrawls draws on two sources in the OSR-sphere: ktrey over at d4caltrops and Chris McDowall over at Bastionland. More specifically, we'll be looking at this hex-stocking example¹ from ktrey detailing hexcrawl stocking procedures and This YouTube video from McDowall about creating encounter tables. That link should take you to the relevant part of the video, but if it doesn't the whole video is separated into chapters and I'll be drawing from the 4 Theme d6 Encounter Table section.

Factions: the Meat and Potatoes of Hexcrawls

The first thing I start with when making a hexcrawl (or really any adventure) are factions. This is particularly important for our purposes, since we want to create a hex that is interconnected and responding to the larger push and pull of various groups. I'll draw from 3 factions I drew up for an Appalachian-inspired setting called the Gladewood I never ended up using. Here's a one-line summary of each of the three:

The Drifter's Council: The de facto leader in the Gladewood and composed of all manner of wanderer types; vaguely organized and only loosely focused on any particular thing besides accumulating power.

Tree Keepers: A few fine folk of the Gladewood banded together long ago to beat down The Drifter's Council when they get a bit too rowdy and burn the trees; they are old friends with nature, but contentment breeds complacency.

The Company: Big business from beyond the Gladewood; abyssal, opaque, and unknowable are their motives, means, and minds.

These aren't particularly inspired. What makes them decent, though, is the relationships you can infer from these quick lines. The Company might ally with The Drifter's Council, or potentially set up a scheme to blame their intrusions into the forest on them, agitating the Tree Keepers. The Tree Keepers, if they catch on to The Company's schemes, might join forces with The Drifter's Council to keep an interloper out of their forests. The important thing is that the factions have flexibility at this stage, which lets us draw connections and further detail the relationships as we make the hex. In my experience, these vague factions become more fleshed out the more points on a hexcrawl that they relate to and the more players begin to mess with the points within a hex.

The Hex: Broad Strokes

Drawing from ktrey's Hex Stocking procedure, we'll first start by rolling 1d6 + 2 for the number of obvious locales and a 1d2 for the number of Hidden locations². I got 4 Obvious locales and 2 hidden ones. A big hex, for sure!

Moving on, the next step is to decide what each location actually is, using the Overland Stocking Table in the document. We get the following locations:

• Hidden Location 1: Landmark/Discovery
• Hidden Location 2: Lair (Resource)
• Location 1: Landmark/Discovery
• Location 2: Hazard
• Location 3: Landmark/Discovery
• Location 4: Lair

This is lovely, but it's looking a bit bland. Here's where the 4 Theme d6 Encounter Table comes in.

The Points of Interest: Finer Details

Every 4 Theme d6 Encounter Table starts with, and this might come as a surprise, 4 themes. These themes could theoretically be anything, but they work best when they are either factions or tangible objects. We'll use two of our factions in this table and then two other aesthetic choices. Any old spark table you can find has some words that would be good for this sort of thing. Our 4 themes will be:

• Tree Keepers
• The Company
• Trees
• Wind

Pretty simply nouns here and nothing special in terms of ideas at this point. If we were building this hex as part of a greater world, it might make sense to throw in some of the features of the geography in place of "trees" and "wind", but since we're making this removed from a greater context I think these will do nicely. Next, we'll combine these 4 Themes into 6 combinations:

• Tree Keepers + The Company
• Tree Keepers + Trees
• Tree Keepers + Wind
• The Company + Trees
• The Company + Wind
• Trees + Wind

Suddenly, we have quick little formulas for our 6 locations! Throwing things together quickly, we wind up with these:

• Hidden Location 1 - Landmark/Discovery (Tree Keepers + The Company): A small grove of oak trees has been cut down here (coin flip between The Company and The Drifter's Council). A single Tree Keeper is moving amongst them, holding funeral rites for those whom they failed to protect.

• Hidden Location 2 - Lair (Resource) (Tree Keepers + Tree): A large clearing hidden between the boughs of birch trees in a corner of the forest dripping in illusion magic. A henge made of 1dd12 + 6 stones sits in the clearing. The Tree Keepers are perched atop the stones, communing with one another in the drones of old oak trees. They are performing an incantation to keep a dark spirit contained. If they are interrupted (any physical contact) the spirit will break free and begin to wreak havoc. If they are allowed to finish, they will prove to be apt tutors in magical studies or herbal remedy.

• Location 1 - Landmark/Discovery (Tree Keepers + Wind): A Tree Keeper named Ash is moving through the forest summoning great gusts of wind to test the health of the trees in this neck of the woods. They are new to the Tree Keepers and incredibly nervous about their performance with this (largely menial) task.

• Location 2 - Hazard (Wind + Trees): A wind spirit has taken residence here in the hollowed out trunk of a mighty oak. As the party nears the tree, they notice a circular wind picking up and feel themselves getting short of breath. The wind spirit desperately wishes to steal the breath from living things.

• Location 3 - Landmark/Discovery (The Company + Wind): The Company is constructing a windmill on top of a large empty hill. Unbeknownst to them, they are building atop the burial mound of a family of treants. Nature will not be happy if Her wards are disturbed in their eternal slumber.

• Location 4 - Lair (The Company + Trees): A large tree has fallen in front of one of The Company's logging routes. There are several carts backed up the road here and a considerable hoard of middle managers twiddling their thumbs and arguing over how to move the fallen tree. There are no protocols for this predicament and the losses are already starting to pile up. They've erected a hastily made camp that is surely not up to protocol. This is upsetting them to no end.

If we were still clamoring for ideas, we could take our third faction and throw them into entries from the table, either replacing the current factions or creating a situation in which two factions might interact with each other. These ideas aren't exactly anything extraordinary, but they are very quick to generate and you'd be surprised about how quickly you can come up with situations relating to these two-word combinations.

The most important thing about all of this is that these encounters all interconnect and the themes are constantly being beaten into your player's face. If they didn't know The Company was big in this area, they will after encountering them so often here. The utility of the 4-theme encounter here as opposed to a normal spark table is to enforce a uniformity of content so you can get something cohesive.

Summary

• Generate some quick one-line factions for the region
• Create a 4-Theme Encounter Table
• Determine the number of Points of Interest in the hex
• Match the combinations of the 4-theme Encounter Table to each Point of Interest in the hex.
• Do some rootin' tootin', writin'!
• Rinse Repeat for the desired number of hexes.

Supplemental Reading

• Landmark and Encounter Placement within Hexagons useful for orienting each point of interest within the hexes and getting a rough idea about where things are located.

• Keystone Species Encounter Table Great for wilderness areas! The blog post that got me interested in wilderness exploration.

Footnotes

1. Ktrey hasn't made these procedures publicly available on his blog as of 4/4/2024, but once they are put up alongside his travel procedures I will return here and link to his blog :)↩

2. This table is essentially the same as the B/X d6 dungeon stocking table but modified slightly for use in overland exploration. 1-2: Landmark/Discovery, 3-4: Lair, 5: Special/Site-based-location, 6: Hazard. Each location has the same chance for a resource that the equivalent dungeon-level content has for treasure (1-in-6, 3-in-6, None, and 2-in-6).↩