Making a hexmap is pretty easy; the hard part comes with throwing things in it. There are a few pitfalls I believe people across the OSR have fallen into that are worth discussing. The goal here isn't to hate on or unjustly criticize other authors for writing bad hexcrawls (in fact, many of the examples beyond this point have redeemable qualities) but to codify two common criticisms I've heard or had about various modules across Discord and the blogs.

Empty or Underfilled Hexes: Too Few Decisions

Isle of the Unknown is one of the worst hexcrawls I've ever read. The biggest problem with the module is just how empty it is. There are 330 hexes in the module and each hex has exactly one point of interest attached to it.¹ This sounds pretty reasonable on its face, but let's take a look at one of the hexes just to see what we're working with here:

"Four limbless, serpentine beavers are the size of wolves, and they slither and swim in a jerky, unpredictable manner."²

This is the only notable thing in a hex that has an area of 86 square miles. That's 1/4 the size of New York City's land area given to four serpentine beavers.

The problem with empty hexes (or underfilled hexes) is that they produce no interesting decisions. Hexcrawls are only a useful tool insofar as they are instrumental to creating interesting decisions. The beaver hex isn't particularly strong in this for a few reasons:

• There is not context provided to create an interesting situation. The beavers aren't connected to the land or the greater world in any meaningful way.
• The hex is simply far too big to realistically encounter these beavers at any point.

If we're generalizing this list out to every empty or underfilled hex, we might come up with something like:

• The hex (and its content) has no relationship to the rest of the world; it is empty or otherwise causally unlinked from the rest of the world
• If the hex has something in it, its chance of discovery is, from a realism or procedural perspective, so small as to make it essentially empty. This then returns us to the previous bullet point.

So how do we fix Underfilled or Empty Hexes? We might try creating a causal relationship between the encounter we have and the neighboring hexes:

"Four limbless, serpentine beavers are the size of wolves, and they slither and swim in a jerky, unpredictable manner. Several weeks ago, the beavers dammed a large river, removing [village in neighboring hex]'s access to water. The dam has formed a large lake."

This attaches the beavers to a web of causality hopefully present in the rest of the world and gives players a large landmark to use for navigation. If the beavers are killed and the dam razed, it affects something else in the world and creates a narrative.

Contrary to what the bullet points might imply above, not every encounter needs to be causally linked to something else actively happening in the world. Consider another hex from Isle of the Unknown:

"A 20' tall statue of iron depicts a smith raising his hammer above an anvil with lettering that reads, “TOUCH NOT THE TREASURE ”. An illusory horde of wrought gold and coins surrounds the anvil. If the illusion is touched, it vanishes and the statue animates and attacks with its now red-hot hammer. The illusion will return one hour after vanishing."³

This hex is pretty mediocre by itself, but in the greater context of the isle it's actually pretty solid. All across the island are these magical statues, sometimes trapped and sometimes enchanted with beneficial magic. While it isn't directly linked to another hex in a gameable way, the encounter does contribute to an overarching theme of the island. While it's still relatively small given the size of the hex, the connection to the rest of the hexcrawl compensates in an acceptable way.

In Summary:

• Underfilled or Empty Hexes are hexes that have no relationship to the world or greater area, or whose size makes any relationship difficult to easily discern.
• To fix this, connect the encounters in the hex to neighboring hexes or larger themes of the hexcrawl.

Uniform Hexcrawls: Dispelling the Illusion of Exploration

Hot Springs Island is probably the best hexcrawls in the OSR space. Far from being too empty, 24 of the 25 hexes have three unique points of interest in an area of about 3.5 square miles, quickly sidestepping the Empty Hex problem. Each point of interest is causally related to the larger themes of the island and is absolutely teeming with relationships to neighboring hexes thanks to the module's robust random encounter generator. In addition to all of this, the book even lays out how the referee is expected to run the hexcrawl and reveal locations to players.

I'm running Hot Springs Island for a group of my friends and it's going really well; it's probably the most excited I've been to run an OSR module at all, which is no small achievement. My players, however, quickly picked up on the fact that there were exactly three locations in every hex and refused to spend any more time in them once they had found all three locations. This creates a loop that, to me, feels formulaic and undesirable: the party will spend three watches exploring a hex in totality, dealing with encounters as they come, before moving to a neighboring hex and repeating the same process. While this process only lasted a few sessions before they got scooped into the faction play, it left a very sour taste in my mouth. If each hex has the same number of discoverable locations, and those locations are (for the most part) easily found, it is in the party's best interest to create a procedure for wilderness exploration that bypasses the interesting choices created by correctly stocked hexes. The decisions made by the players aren't made from knowing something about the world but instead from noticing a pattern in how the module is written. Putting this in bullet point form, a hexcrawl suffers from the uniformity problem when:

• The hexes have a static number of points of interest that aren't immediately obvious.
• This static number, if it becomes noticed, creates a gameplay loop that is not based on the world but the way in which the hexcrawl is written.

Notably, I don't think all hexcrawls suffer from this problem. Hideous Daylight has exactly one point of interest per hex, but when I ran it for the same group of people, their choices about navigating and exploring the hexes were based on their goals and the landscape rather than the understanding that there was one point of interest per hex. Because they had essentially the whole hex in view, they never had to spend time looking through each hex to find stuff.

To solve this issue, just randomize the number of locations in each hex, or make them all visible from the get go. Randomizing the number of locations creates an inherent uncertainty in spending time to further explore a hex. Whereas with a static number of points of interest the party knew that they could spend a specific amount of time exploring and expect a guaranteed return on investment, the randomized number means that they risk wasting time and resources if they have fully explored the hex. Making each location in a hex visible from the start would also solve this problem, since the question goes from "is there stuff here worth exploring?" to "In what order do we interact with the points of interest?"

In Summary:

• Hexes suffer from the Uniformity problem when the number of locations in a hex is a greater factor in the player's decision making than the actual contents of the hex itself.
• This can be solved by randomizing the number of points of interest in a given hex or revealing all the points of interest in a hex when the hex is traveled into.

1. Well-read folks will know that Isle of the Unknown encourages Referees to make their own encounters and other things for each hex in addition to what is provided. To me, that is a poor excuse for making an empty hexcrawl and trying to sell it to people.↩

2. Where applicable, statblocks and other game information has been scrubbed. This text can be found on page 39 of Isle of the Unknown by Geoffrey McKinney, ISBN 978-952-5904-33-8.↩

3. Page 20 of Isle of the Unknown.↩