I’m interested in hearing how you handle your group’s searching of wilderness hexes. There’s something like 30+ square miles in a 6-mile hex. That’s a vast area. One would think that simply moving overland through the hex isn’t enough to simply come across whatever’s there.
How much time do you require for the group to exhaustively search a hex? What kind of rolls do you ask for? Do you give Explorers bonuses to such rolls?
For my campaign, I break the six-mile hex into 24 smaller hexes, each 1.5 miles across (and covering 1.3 square miles). Before aerial surveys were possible, the party would do it one smaller hex at a time.
A single day of marching can cover 24 miles in length. If you gridded a smaller hex into strips 100 yards wide, 24 miles is very close to enough distance to walk through each square in that grid - so spending one day in a 1.5-mile hex is more than sufficient to hit any lairs, barring truly awful luck.
And most lairs are more obvious than that. So I usually allowed them to auto-discover a lair once for every four hours of hiking, which let them hit two smaller hexes per day, or three if they pushed it with the forced march rules.
Since I laid out which lairs were in which of the 1.5-mile hexes, this meant they might clear out a hex in anything from 1-12 days, depending on how fast they worked and how lucky they got in picking hexes (and how much they paid attention to terrain clues I gave them).
Thanks, that a nice idea.
Warder
Thank you for the advice, Cameron.
If I may ask, do you map out a regional map ahead of time roughly 30x40 consisting of 6-mile hexes as recommended in the rulebook? Or, do you begin from a starting point and only detail the area out to a certain number of hexes surrounding that point?
I’m just trying to get the benefit of other people’s experiences. I’m prepping a sandbox game with a region the size recommended in the book and that’s an immense number of 1.5 mile sub-hexes to detail. It already feels like an unmanageable amount of work at the 6-mile hex level.
Actually mapping out everything IS unmanageable, from my point of view. I am a moderately lazy DM - not quite lazy enough to just use someone else’s setting, but too lazy to do all the work suggested by the ACKS book. So I focus on ways to give the ILLUSION of having done all the work suggested therein (heh).
I use pages 2 and 4 of the ACKS Blank Hex Maps for almost everything, and my comments below assume you’re somewhat familiar with them.
Page 4 is the campaign map. Using it at a 24-mile scale for the smallest hexes, I sketched out the BORDERS for seven 60-90 hex kingdoms, which covered about 50% of the map, mostly in the upper half; a few major terrain features like the coastline, mountains, and large rivers; and a few terrain-scale points of interest like an abandoned dwarven highway.
Then I named and placed two Class I cities unaligned with any kingdom (Paris and Ziwa), and one class II city in each kingdom (since they’re small kingdoms). No more detail than that, though.
Then, for ONE of the kingdoms (Thervingi, where the PCs start), I also marked 2 Class III, 5 class IV, and 15 class V urban settlements: about one per three hexes, and I named the Class II city in that kingdom (Orléans).
Current State: At this point, what I have drawn on the map consists of, like, ten lines, a couple of mountain symbols, some Kingdom names, some stars to represent cities, the words Paris and Ziwa for Class I cities, and some scribbled notes. That leaves huge swaths of the map empty, but that’s okay. When I need to fill in a detail, I will. And honestly, the vast majority of that empty space has been unneeded - and my players are hitting around level 10.
Then I switched to page 2 for the regional map.
Here, I pretty much ignored the entire region map, and picked ONE 24-mile hex (p. 2’s map has large 24-mile hexes and small 6-mile hexes) to actually map out. On the campaign map, this hex had a Class V village, which I named (Châtel) and placed in a six-mile hex; then I added a Class VI village in an adjacent hex, and noted that Corbus du Châtel was a high-level wizard with a sanctum and dungeon in the same hex as Châtel; and filled in the river lines.
Current State: 96% of my regional map is completely blank. I’ve marked one 24-mile hex with two village stars and names, and some notes, and a river line showing a more precise path than the campaign map did.
Then I use page 2 for a local map. For a local map, I use the upper-left-most large hex (with sub-hexes 0102, 0103, 0201, 0202, etc.). The large hex represents the whole six-mile hex; each sub-hex is 1.5 miles across.
There are 16 of them, and this is the only map I put any real effort into. I picked one sub-hex for Châtel itself to go into, and wrote a key for each sub-hex, that looks something like these two sub-hex keys:
#0204: Hill. Mostly peasant families and farms.
#0403: Large Hill and Stream. Châtel. 250 families, Class V, 20 years old, river bank, forest, hilly). Economy -2 precious metals, textiles, furs, and wood; -1 tea and coffee; +1 pottery, spices, and silk; and +2 monster parts. Corbus du Châtel built a sanctum and dungeon here. Basina de Brienne founded a shop to feed adventurers. The village grew around both. Surrounding farms fill the sub-hex.
Current State: I have 16 entries, most short-and-sweet. I’ve also posted a more complete example of a key I did here - it takes some work to format that for this forum, and I am moderately lazy, so look at that one to see what I’m talking about.
When the adventurers are going to explore a 24-mile hex, I map out the 16 6-mile hexes inside that 24-mile hex.
When they are going to explore a 6-mile hex, I map out the 16 1.5-mile hexes inside that 6-mile hex.
Otherwise, I don’t bother. ACKS scales nicely enough that you can assign broad parameters to something (“the kingdom of Greuthungi has XX thousand gold in troops”) and only break it down more thoroughly later if you need to.
I also worked out some random generation steps for 24- and 6-mile hexes, for those times when I don’t have much warning:
For a 24-mile hex:
For a 6-mile hex:
I also stick dwarven ruins as a “bonus” point of interest if there is a mountain, because in my setting, dwarves used to own all of the mountains, and you can’t find a mountain without an abandoned mine or temple or fortress.
And a brief example of my illusory improvisational techniques here.
What a great reply, Cameron. Thank you. You’ve given me much to consider and adopt.
There must be a need out there for a book that helps one build a hex-crawl campaign world from the hex up. I’ve been doing it the slow and perhaps overly-thorough way because I just want to be able to start the game and let the players go where they will without much more heavy lifting on my part. I’m always concerned with how much ground an unencumbered party can cover in a single day. How much content that actually represents, both in terms of how much should be there to be discovered and also, given the size of the hex, what the odds are of actually finding the content. It makes me think that wilderness travel should have two modes just like dungeon movement; a travel mode and a slower, deliberate search mode.
In my previous non-hex crawl campaigns, I would simply assume that the party encountered whatever was located in their general vicinity. All of the searching would be glossed over in favor of simply forwarding the story. I’m disinclined to do so for my upcoming campaign.
… holy crap, how did I miss this? Dear Autarchs: if you ever get around to compiling that “Best of ACKS Posts” compendium, this post should be considered.
Indeed.