Terrain Affinity - A Hexcrawl Tool
A few years ago, my first sandbox campaign used the Beyond the Wall (BtW) system, and it was also an excuse to buy Hexographer to create my own hexcrawl. I had no idea what I was doing, so I often referred to Prismatic Wasteland's Hexcrawl Checklist, a post that's fast become a classic reference. I also owned tons of adventures, dungeons, and settings that I wanted to drop into the world. BtW felt like a great system for achieving that, and the village creation gave a natural starting hex. My group created Idaho, a lovely little village with some secrets in the dark arts. After a handful of sessions, these are the things they heard about the world.
Some of you might immediately recognize a few locations listed by name, but if you don't, I stocked the following adventures/settings (check them out):
- Falkrest Abbey by Axian Spice
- Tannic by Amanda P.
- Tomb Robbers of the Crystal Frontier by Gus L.
- Hideous Daylight by Brad Kerr
- The Blackapple Brugh by Kyle Hettinger
- Bloodsoaked Gem Caverns by Tamás Kisbali
For travel between hexes, I used a mixture of Dolmenwood's camping rules and the d30 Sandbox Companion.
It's funny to look back at these, because now I know quite a few of these folks! When I was starting out, I thought, "These are the cool folks making cool things and I want to include them" I mean, I still think that, but I never imagined I'd get to playtest Amanda P.'s new adventure at PAX Unplugged. Community is a delightful and fragile thing that we must work hard to take good care of. Back to hexcrawls!!
Here is the GM view of the same map with the listed out modules/settings named.
Did we get to even a fraction of all this? Nope - the campaign subsequently blew up after 6-7 sessions, haha. I still have my map, and I earned valuable GM experience when it comes to sandbox play. It also gave birth to the idea of Terrain Affinity that would serve well in any given hexcrawl.
What is Terrain Affinity?
Parties often go through the same hex multiple times, and while we many tools exist to create encounters and the like, I wanted a quick tool to reward players passing through the same clearing 10 times. To do this, I had a list of the hexes with a pips underneath the hex name. Each time the party entered the hex, I filled in a pip. Once they hit X amount of pips, a secret is revealed.
In the image, the party has traveled through this Basic Hex twice, but on the fourth time they pass through it (past the pipe symbol that indicates triggering something), a new location is revealed. This could be the following:
- Landmark that's commonly known to locales but not on any maps
- A small set of ruins that's often missed due to the overgrowth
- New NPCs could have moved into the area and/or reveal themselves after watching the party come through enough times
While this isn't an exhaustive list, it's an easy way to drop additional, fun moments into a hexcrawl without stocking the map with events that are far away from each other. If factions and NPCs change over time, why can't knowledge of the land change as well?
Let me know your thoughts over on BlueSky @Bakenshake.