just draw a map - an alternative to hexcrawling
iāve been running a (mostly) weekly OSE megadungeon for almost a year now, and i feel qualified to give the following recommendation to any DMs mapping the wilderness around the dungeon: you donāt need a hexcrawl.
donāt get me wrong, iāve got nothing against a hexcrawl. and iām certainly not trying to slight you if you want to use one. but iāve personally had more success with my simpler system, and i havenāt seen it presented as an option among ttrpg circles, so i want to share it here.
and iām not talking about pointcrawls either! my system: just draw a map
thatās basically it
- draw a map of your area of interest (or steal a map from a real life wilderness area!)
- note the scale of your map. the one iāve been using for my campaign is 1 inch = 1 mile. it means that a standard sheet of graph paper gives you a day or two of exploration in any direction, which works for my table.
- thatās it.
during game, i just narrate the physical environment that the players observe, using a ruler to track how many miles they have traveled, and they tell me where they want to go.
you follow the Red River south for 6 miles. it bends slightly to the west before you emerge at the northern end of a large, oval lake. you can see the lake shore curving south on both sides of you, though you cannot see the far side of the lake over the horizon. at the edge of your vision, you can see a roughly 4-mile-wide island in the middle of the lake. itās now midday, where do you want to head?
no gamified hexcrawl or pointcrawl, no player-facing mechanics besides the fact that they only have a certain number of miles that they can travel in a day. not that thereās anything wrong with player-facing exploration mechanics, but if you want your players to engage with the world as though it were real, i think it helps to keep mechanics minimal.
i havenāt been on the player side of this ājust draw a mapā system, and i havenāt seen it run this way in any actual plays, but iām sure that this is not an original idea to me. i say this not only because i know my limits, but also because i got the idea from the original Keep on the Borderlands map. i donāt have a copy of it myself, and iām not aware of any public-domain images available of it, but here is a link to a fellow blogger whoās posted an image of it, for your reference.
iāve got no idea how the actual, original Keep on the Borderlands played, but i saw the map offhand one day and the sight of it fired synapses in my brain i never knew existed.
so thatās really it. iām not sure if this warranted a whole mini blog post, but itās a really easy system both for building a wilderness and running adventures in it, and it helps keep the world grounded in the relative reality of a simple map, but iāve not seen it done very often.
let me know if you try this out and like / dislike it!