Create a DnD Hex Crawl 

Technically a point of interest?

@@Earthmote yep, a plain nondescript Coast Douglas Fir tree 🙂. What do you do?

​@@lexington476I climb the tree to see what the neighboring hexes contain.

@@lexington476 Now what would a Coast Douglas Fir be doing out in the Grasslands? Hmmm...

​@@diregnome4898Breath of the Wild, the hexcrawl

Glad its useful, and I have more to come!

Great way to build out a hex crawl is to just take modules or components of modules and use them in the different hexes. Happy gaming!

I use Dyson maps all the time for my hex keyed dungeons! They are great.

Yeah, I'd definitely have them come across a keyed area for "free" just by entering the hex, something like a landmark or obvious fortification. You can have ones that are more hidden or take time to search for, which makes sense.

I like to think of it in terms of what can be obviously seen from a distance (the falls of Rauros or Weathertop, for example), what can be found through simple exploration (the ford in the River Isen), and what requires either dedicated surveying or some form of specific knowledge to find (Faramir's camp, the Paths of the Dead where Aragorn found his ghost minions, or Shelob's lair). The obviously seen stuff is part of the general description of the area. The general exploration stuff can depend on what they say they're doing (not going to find many caves in your plan of action is to walk along the ewok bridges) or a low target skill roll. The specific stuff would be a high target roll and/or prior knowledge of where/what to look for. I feel like I took that from someone else's advice many moons ago, but couldn't tell you where from or how accurate my version is to the original, though lol

Thank you!

I've never played or read through Isle of Dread, so I didn't want to recommend it. But it is the classic, that's for sure!

Yeah we differ in that aspect. I don't mind my players thinking in Gamified terms. If it helps them remember where points of interest are and what not, that is fine with me. Nothing against keeping it hidden though! Could be interesting to try.

Thank you for the kind words! Glad it was useful

Gavin Norman does great work. Looking forward to the printed Dolmenwood Books!

@@Earthmote Oh yes! Going for a change of pace with the GotFN gives me the opportunity to enjoy my OSE boxed sets more which is very exciting but getting the latest Dolmenwood pdf's of adventures and the character sheets are really enticing as well!

Good luck!

Stars Without Number would be a great resource for that! Its Worlds Without Number's Sci-Fi version (actually its predecessor). There is a free PDF version on DriveThruRPG you can get if you want to check it out.

Its a good thought! I'll add it to my ideas list; have to figure out how to make it interesting enough to watch.

Best of luck!

Glad it was helpful!

Azgaar's is a great tool! I didn't remember it had a hex overlay. Thanks for sharing.

The orange book is Petty Gods, I haven't read enough of it to give it a recommendation one way or another. Lulu hardcover: shorturl.at/nHOY4 The black book is Atlas of Latter Earth the expansionary book for WWN. Should be next to WWN but my organization gets a bit messed up when I take books out to use. Offset print here: shorturl.at/xMPS9 or PDF: shorturl.at/anwTV

@@Earthmote Thanks for the detailed answer! I should have recognized the Atlas ^^"

Having moved across the country five times in my life, I think I can speak to this. The cliche's "If you build it, they will come," and "You've got to kiss a lot of toads," come to mind. Here's what I did: : Looking for Call of Cthulhu, no one running, offered to run, disaster; came into D&D night, and made some casual friends; made friends with the owner; the next game I ran was the beta of Edge of the Empire, which was fairly fun, albeit impossible to keep up with the errata with a rules grognard at the table; got invited to a couple of private games, cherry picked the best group, and we all share similar values : Went to local game nights, found a few like-minded folks, went to WashingCon, played in a bunch of games, and found a couple more, one friend from the bar band circuit and I had a supergroup. Oh, somewhere in there was a bad Adventurers League experience in Annapolis. : Went to my FLGS. After seeing nothing but D&D and PF, I asked the person working there (who happened to be the general manager), "Where are all the people who play ?" He said he'd always wanted to start an "Indie RPG night" and couldn't start until January. I said, "Well, let's kick the tires on it; I've got about four games I can run for about four or five weeks each to test it out." So we did, and it's still going. Granted, people have dropped off, shown up for Vampire and left when that was done, had fights, had scheduling conflicts, obstructions from the store, and all sorts of other problems. I also posted my own longterm campaigns in the store and paid their table fees to run things like and a game, and met some great people there. Oh, and a few from an improv workshop one day. The key ingredient is to stick with it. Give a night about three weeks, get approval and backing from the store, make some flyers in Canva or whatever, massage those Meetups and Discords periodically, and lock in with those players that resonate with you. Get those phone numbers. Not always easy or comfortable, and I will say the jewel in the box is worth having. If your town is much smaller, or don't have a local store, you may have to post at the library, coffee shops, or your local B&N; run the game you want, and then let someone run the game that they want. Session Zeros ("Sessions Zero"?) aren't just for safety tools; they're also a great place to talk about what kinds of themes and play styles players want to explore, whether that's forever or for a change for this particular campaign. I hope that helps. Happy to answer any questions and hear feedback.

Darnit!

Wow! This is highly competitive 😆 It looked on my side that I was the first 😎

Remember it is a game, it shouldn't be realistic (unless you and your group like that style of gamea). I like how it is done in Dolmenwood: Once the party enters a hex, all the evident features are available to explore and experiment with. There might be hidden features (such as the cave you mentioned) that need to be found exploring the hex, it doesn't need no to a perception check (I guess you're playing 5e) but a whole day searching and exploring into the hex.

Yeah, so like @sekcer9873 said, you should have an obvious feature that the players are able to encounter as they travel through the hex. A landmark or an obvious fortification, something like that. If you want to have more "hidden" ruins, I would just have them spend time searching to hex to uncover it. No need to call for a roll in this case. The cost is the time spent searching. Now, if you want something truly secret, so secret that even if they are searching for it, they could overlook it. Then you can call for a roll. If your using 5e, perception, investigation, survival whatever makes sense given the context of what they're looking for. My only caution with keyed areas that are this level of secret is that they could never be found! Which is okay, but just keep that in mind when you are prepping a whole dungeon/ruin that may never be seen. So, I'd recommend keeping them small. Of course you can always recycle unused material. But it is just something to keep in mind with your time and energy for game prep. Best of luck in your games!

To possibly put some meat to the points the other comments make, I've tried (and failed) to run a Hexcrawl twice for my group. Both times, a major component in the Hexcrawl falling apart was that most of the land my party travelled across was uninteresting and empty. Sometimes they would enter a keyed hex, but not search for something, sometimes they would be just a little off from a keyed hex but still in a completely empty area. Regardless, it started to make it feel like there weren't all that many choices, and they were essentially just waiting for me to make things happen to them via random encounters. I'm planning to run a hexcrawl again in the next few months, and I think keying every hex is the thing that's probably going to be most important to making it succeed. Even if the players aren't finding new adventures everywhere, giving them things to note and write down is going to be an important part of making the game engaging and interesting.

That's where the player-driven-ness of hexcrawls must shine through. Why are your player characters trudging into the wilderness time and time again? Perhaps one has ambitions of becoming a frontier lord and ruling their own stronghold; another may be looking for revenge against a corrupt priest that falsely accused them of colluding with enemies and had them banned from their homeland, and the wilderness is where evidence of the villain's wrongdoings; and a third one may have had their loved one petrified and is looking for a way to undo the curse. Talk to your players, come up with some good motivations, and weave them through the hex keys and rumor tables! You all may be surprised by the stories that pop up when these motivations start to interact with each other.