Hexcrawl Flower - A Hexcrawl Mechanic for filling in those hexes.
An, as far as I know, unique and new hexcrawl mechanic.
Welcome back everyone, I hope you’ve all had an amazing week and if not, I hope things get better for you sooner than later. This week was another one of those “I’m stuck and have no idea what to do next” kind of weeks, but again, I sat down and started doing something. Anything at all and suddenly I found myself knee keep in joyful work. I know I could be working on the foraging mechanic I introduced last week, however, the excitement just wasn’t there this week, so I moved onto another idea I’ve been keeping in the background.
The use of custom dice is temping, however, it’s also out of reach for the average person, so instead I modified Goblin’s Henchmen’s idea where they suggest using 12-sided dice for building up a hexcrawl map, which is then demonstrated by The Pink Phantom.
I modified the idea, adding a 13th hex, and created a ‘Hexcrawl Flower’ that distributes different types of terrain through out a hex map in a programmed sort of way. I took Goblins henchman’s idea of taking a d12 (d13 in this case) and flattening out the faces so that they can be seen two-dimensionally and then each face would then represent a specific type of terrain. The faces could then contain a majority amount of a particular type of terrain, e.g. mountains, forest, prairie, swamp. They would also contain a terrain type that would commonly be found in the surrounding area, as well as a ‘Special’ (#13) face to represent possible quests, dungeons, temples, odd locations, and so forth, and of course a Water Feature. Each 13 tile section is spilt into three, below is the center portion, there other two fit on both sides.
What I’m goin to show you are a few (as in three) different setups showing how to use the Hexcrawl Flower, and three different results, which in my opinion go from okay, to bad, to really good, but they all work in different ways and present something, I think for everyone. While they are not resolute, they do represent a rough average. Certainly more results are needed to be fully conclusive, but I think I’ve worked it out enough to predict the curve.
So here we go, here is the Hexcrawl Flower: (Click the image(s) for a larger version)
Using the same idea, only with 13 hexes per section, I added a series of icons representing various terrains and combined them into one large, Hexflower Map. Starting at the center “Mountain Range”, I used the same Navigation Hex I used previously along with 2d4 (2 4-sided dice) and completed the following color map.
To create the shape of the map, I stared with a single hexflower in the center and then added various other hexflower’s around it, for a total of seven. Not the most efficient way of creating a map, but it’s what I had on hand when I started. And you can add more around it to create a larger area in any direction and or shape you please. I used the above shape for ease of presentation.
Still very experimental, as expected, I ran into a few problems, namely with what I’m calling The Great Bowels of Esdon, the large swamp area that almost encircles the inner area. Esdon being the necromancer whose curse lay upon this land, the ever growing swamp will someday swallow up the entire area should the curse not be settled.
Actually I found myself trapped in the swamp hex’s because I originally put a doorway (red line) blocking the way, when in reality I should have put a key, which simply means to repeat this hex at least the number of times shown, in this case one time, before passing through. Similar to the point system used in the previous Foraging Mechanic, but no keeping track of points. Once you’ve rolled toward a key, you may pass through the next time you roll in that direction freely until you enter that hex again. Using keys, assures that a certain terrain types get used effectively and in some cases, to prevent an overabundance of certain features from occurring.
Note the one Mountain hex in the map I created. I later added a third Key (see below) to the top of the hex in the hopes of getting more mountains. The map above was created previous to this change. As you can see, I never came back into the mountain hex again. I did, however, traverse across virtually every other hex on the Hexcrawl Flower and came to notice some interesting patterns with this setup.
First, most Special locations are almost always near water and/or swamps. Towns appear to pattern out this way as well, but that’s partially due to my movement during exploration. I was moving outwards, following a circular counter clockwise fashion, creating onion like layers. Truly, if one was exploring a large land mass this would be an efficient way of cataloging the area, but not so much for adventuring as it negates a natural movement.
Second, Swamps can appear next to Prairies, which as far as I know, is unrealistic. And while ‘unrealistic’ doesn’t bother me that much, it just feels out of place for me. While this cannot really be prevented, I did make some changes (see below) that assist with, but do not take away the issue entirely.
Third, there’s not enough prairie in my opinion, so maybe a few key’s are needed in the praries to make their presence more fertile.
Also, Special’s and Town Features show up quite a bit more than expected. However, these Hex’s will include a d20 list of possibilities. A town feature does not always mean a town, it could also be a farm, a small community, a single cabin occupied and not, and other types of settlements, including ‘gypsy-like’ groups as well as camps and various related experiences, most of which can lead to some form of adventuring.
Special’s are almost always chances for adventure. Ruins, temples, shrines, dungeons, grave sites, ghosts, found strange objects, lost NPC’s, portals, holes in the ground, eerie places, etc, etc. Keeping in mind that I went in a giant circle when creating that first map, Specials and Town Features will be less dense with other means of exploring. And while on I’m on it, I don’t know that having so many opportunities for adventure is a bad thing. You don’t have to take on every quest you come across, unless you want to, but having the option I don’t think is a negative.
And finally, the forest and plains area’s clump together en masse, which is what I like personally, so that’s perfectly dialed in my opinion. Obviously there are more types of terrain than the ones I’ve used, but these are the types I plan on utilizing for myself currently. You are more than welcome to use this method on your own with your own terrain types and techniques. I will be making others down the line also, but that could be awhile.
Taking in into consideration the above patterns, I made some changes to the Hexcrawl Flower. Namely I’ve added an additional Key the mountain range, and two additional keys to the Special hex’s and two additional doors in the Prairies on each side. In addition I added some redirect arches off that top center Special Feature to try and reduce the amount of Special Features that are surrounded by swamps and or water features.
And I made another map, as you can see below, using the usual Navigation Hex. You can see there are far more clumps of Plains and Forest, along with more Mountain ranges, a bit less Specials, a nominal range of Swamp, minimal Prairie, and just one Town Feature. Those latter being issues in my opinion.
I’d say this is more due to how I explored; by branching out in different directions and backtracking to unexplored areas, however, the results here are more a matter of how the Navigation Hex works.
The Navigation Hex is as you might remember, is ‘programmed’ so that you statistically, head upwards more often than not. And that’s fine, because you end up with larger clumps particular areas, in this case, Forest and Plains primarily, which is by design. For this particular map, or rather the area being mapped out is primarily those terrain types. I do plan on tweaking it so that, when appropriate, a player can pick the type of area they want to explore by simply choosing from a variety of Hexcrawl Flowers.
But first, I need to make sure it works and I think we’ve established that it does to some extent. There are obvious pitfalls to this method, and I’ve run into several patterns, like we see above, where there is a serious lack of certain features, such as Brown Hex’s, i.e. towns, farms, camps, and you know, civilization. Now this may not matter if say, each hex only represents a small area such as 1 mile, even less if you’re say building a town. Which by the way is coming up soon, a Town Hexflower is in the works as I write this. If that sort of thing excites you, be sure to subscribe.
And you may prefer a setting with less towns and more exploring, but that doesn’t mean you wont find yourself in a battle with dice and the Hexcrawl Flower giving you what seems like an almost endless pattern similar terrain. And of course you can take control and fix the issue yourself, but that breaks the immersion doesn’t it? There’s a way to give yourself more control to do either one, and that’s by influencing a single roll whenever you feel it’s needed. Since we have two values that send the player straight upward, the 5,6 combo, I think we need to take one of those values, the 6, and instead of using it to move upward, use it to move in a direction of one neighboring hex on Hexcrawl Flower of our choosing. This action, at least to me, seamlessly gets absorbed into the game just as it should.
This is of course optional and in the map below I used it only when I felt it was needed, rather than every time I rolled a 6. When it wasn’t needed I used it as usual, to move upward on the Hexcrawl Hexflower. I’ve marked the locations where I used it below, mostly to break patterns where I felt I was getting stuck, or to place ‘features’ in otherwise boring areas.
Alas, I think this is the perfect map, and it’s mostly due to taking charge when I rolled a 6 and made a direction change right noted by the white dots above, right? Yes and no. A lot is of course left up to the various aspects outside of our control, so your results will vary of course, but I hope this last methods helps tune in some much needed customization. I’ll continue to work on this further of course and improve upon it as I go.
I also decided to start at a different location, marked by the yellow X. I then worked my way up the lower left edge, and eventually back down where I swept up through that rather large prairie space on the bottom left edge, then back across through the center and up and around, coming back down creating a sort of pac-man shape, until I moved back inward to finish off with the plains and forest near the single water feature in the center.
This is, in my opinion a more balanced map than the previous ones and it was quite fun making it. I’d like to think it’s a good example of what’s possible using this mechanic. We’ve gone from an empty space to a fully loaded map in a matter of 30 or so minutes. You can of course fill it up as you go, or do it all at once and explore it after.
Some of the ideas I keep in mind are things like line of site, (LOS). One can most likely see into the surrounding hexes, and get an idea of what type of terrain it is from a distance. So rolling for surrounding hexes is a consideration. Obviously you can’t see so well in a forest, or past a mountain range, but those choices are best left up to the player, who knows better than anyone else as to what is what.
Another thing I tend to do is curate the map just slightly. For example if I roll a patch of forest all by itself in the middle of a prairie, but there is some nearby, say within a 2-3 hexes, I will go ahead and place it there instead. Or if a Special (Purple) is too close to another Special, I’ll go ahead and place in a more conventional location within 2-3 hexes.
A lot of the time, I’m creating a story line while I crawl a map. It’ s not intentional, but the placement of things tends to take on a life of it’s own. That gives me an idea already of where I want to take things, should the chance arrive. You’d be surprised how often the universe has the same ideas as you do and it just happens to work out, if not here, someplace else. But if it doesn’t share your ideas, don’t be afraid to manipulate things so that they work in your favor. Expressing yourself is what this is all about, have fun and explore your ideas to the fullest.
For example, this portion of the map. As I started to work my way back up and around from the lower left I decided there was something going on here. At first I thought, well there’s a passage there, between to towers maybe… Then as I came back down later from the top I placed that third Special, a third wizards tower...
And since I don’t have any tables in place currently to tell me what those are, I decided that I there was two necromancers whom are working together to cause three wizards to fight amongst themselves. This has been going on for so log it’s beginning to corrupt the land around the surrounding area, which is what the necromancers want. Because you see this area is powerful, it has several Ley lines that run across this area making it quite the spot for magical and spiritual practices.
Naturally the area will take on the energies of those around it, those that are able to harness it. The wizards, as of late, have begin harnessing its power to harm the other wizards. The necromancers plans are starting to come together and soon this area will become corrupt with the power of the necromancers, the wizards most likely destroying one another in the process.
You there! Yes… you. Will you take on the task of saving the land from corruption, or will you let it fall?
Not to put you on the spot…
And yes, I’m leaving out some details, such as rolling for encounters, and a whole lot of other subjects I’m not able to touch on this week. We’ll get into that down the line. Let me know in the comments what you would do, or if you have any suggestions, or you just want to say something else. Maybe you want to talk about plants. And that’s where I’m finishing up this week. I hope everyone has an amazing week, take care of one another and keep smiling, even if you don’t want to.
Appreciate you all, very much.