Overland and Exploration Procedures

I made a procedure cheat sheet for myself and stuck it into my Ref screen. It looks like this: 

Here is the .doc file for your edification. 

Westmarch Crawl Format

I've been going through all my 6-mile hexes and assigning each a wandering monster table, an adventure and a wonder. The one-mile hexes are numbered 1-30 so we can randomly determine where in the hex various features reside - just in case it's important later, which it might be. 

Each hex (Except for the castle hex) ought to be an adventure site of its own, and many of them will be suitable to return to over and over. 

As the several players explore and level up, I will suggest to them that their characters ought to fortify areas out in the world as staging areas. There will be towns and villages; some will be adventure sites in their own right and some will be neutral or friendly. By fortifying these areas, the characters will be able to travel farther as well as tame the land. If they have to return to 0800 every day, they won't be able to go much farther than the first adjacent hex.

This will also prepare the people for their new lords, who will (hopefully?) be PCs. 

Here are the charts we use to determine 1) what the encounter is about and 2) what the Special will be. You can see that the Special gets hoarier as the land gets wilder. 

Here we have the Landmark generator. It's very complicated. I'm sure there is an easier way to do it but this is the procedure I will use when we start. Landmarks are not going to come up all that often, but when they do, they should be true and interesting landmarks and not something generic. 

Finally, here is the hex worksheet itself. One per page, all the info you need to generate encounters, and a diagram of the hex so I can draw in the features as they pop up. 

You will see that each hex has a dominant terrain type. In this case "Settled." It also has an N number. In this case, N = 1. That refers to how often we check for an encounter. For this particular hex, we would only check which exploring, but for other hexes we would check while traveling through. 

(Recall that overland travel requires N checks per hex on 1d6, checked upon hex entry; exploring a hex requires one check per hour, with 1-N on 1d10 resulting in an encounter.)

This particular hex has no adventure in it. I don't want the players stopping here - this is safe home territory. 

Question for the penny groundlings: shall we give the several characters a chance to get lost, or shall we forego that part of the crawl? It seems punitive to me tbh. 

Wilderness Overland Travel versus Wilderness Exploration

This is probably stupid and obvious to you but it's just become crystalized in my mind: Travel is not the same as exploration and therefore requires different procedures. 

This hot nugget hit me over the head with a steel chair when I was making up the Ref panel for my hexcrawl campaign. I made this chart, and I like it:

The last two columns are for rolling for encounters. I'm going to try it like this. 

If the party are moving overland, then they have N checks on a 1d6 every time they enter a hex. Any result of '1' results in an encounter. That encounter triggers 1d8-1 hours after they enter a hex, but always while they are in that hex. 

If the party have stopped in a hex to explore, they have an N in 10 chance to have an encounter every hour. I think this is better because it will speed things along a little. 

Again, traveling: 

• throw 1d6 N times upon entering a new hex.
• a 1 result generates an encounter.
• each of the encounters will happen 1d8-1 hours after they enter, but always before they enter the next one.

Again, exploring: 

• throw a 1d10 each hour. 
• a result of N or less generates an encounter during that hour.

Also note that I am using movement points per hex instead of miles per day, and N hews closely (but not perfectly) to the number of movement points necessary to cross. This makes more costly hexes to travel potentially more dangerous too, which I think is the way it should be.

What do you think?