Hexcrawl Procedures Supplement

[CptClyde]

Well welcome to the hobby! I love hearing about people's experiences. please feel free to post your "after action report" here if you get to play this weekend. I'd love to hear a synopsis of what happened lol. Thanks for sharing and happy rolling!

[delcidkidv]

I was thinking and it seems like it would be easy to digitize all the rolling done on pages 3 through 4. I’d be happy to do it but I don’t have any coding experience. I can’t seem to find any tutorials for making nested random tables based on user selected parameters either. But if someone knew of any easy tools to do it or like a python tutorial about random tables I’d love to get that digitized.

[toddlyons]

Maybe it's generational or perhaps just personal preference, but I prefer more die rolling to less. But if anyone's inclined to create tools, sure, why not?

[Solomoriah]

My Dungeoneer project has structures and procedures for random tables. It's kind of ugly, honestly, but it does do that.

https://github.com/Solomoriah/Dungeoneer

[delcidkidv]

Thank you! I’ll give it a look and try to digitize the hex crawl when I get back to my PC.

[CptClyde]

Very interesting idea, thank you for your efforts!

[spielemusik]

So after reading through the Hexcrawl Adventures a few times and giving one more quick read in the core rules under Dungeon Adventures, Wilderness Adventures, The Encounter sections, I started a playthrough test. I'm using the printout hex paper with numbers and checkbox paper from the downloads page, and of course the Hexcrawl Log. For the encounters, I of course employ the drop dice method and use my battlemat with erasable markers. I started in the middle of the hex map moved a few hexes west. It was a bit slow at first until I got used to some of the bookkeeping. I was micromanaging down to rations per day and water consumption. I came up with my own quick symbols for designating types of terrain, vegetation, and water - small enough to fit in the tiny hexes and not cause strain in the eyes when giving a quick glance at the map. After catching my groove with bookkeeping and the game mechanics from the core rules for encounters and combat, I really started to have fun as the world started taking shape in front of me. I made notes of POIs and started coming up with backstories for these places, with future ideas of underground dungeons beneath ruins etc... In fact, I came up with a story about the starting hex - the town the adventure started from. I was able to incorporate story elements I had previously written, and I started keeping my laptop open to the side with a Google doc opened to start taking notes on the world - nothing too detailed, mostly just story ideas about the POIs.

It was about this time my daughter asked to join. We spent the rest of the day Sunday traversing through the world - retreating from crocodiles in the marsh, evading a band of 16 orcs, and even happening across a unicorn! One of the party died, and my daughter learned the valuable lesson of running away. We had a blast. I think we played for 4 hours. After we were done, I looked at the hexcrawl log notes and came up with a few ideas for npcs in the starting town. What I thought was basically going to just be a self-tutorial on the mechanics of the core rules in the context of the hexcrawl became a tool for world building - a pleasant surprise. More importantly, my daughter and I were able to start playing without a background story or module to follow - eventually I do want to run the pre-made adventures in the BFRPG "canon."

The whole initial hexcrawl exprience with my daughter reminded me of a passage from one of my favorite books. "We must not miss the road, or we shall be done for," he said. "We need food, for one thing, and rest in reasonable safety--also it is very necessary to tackle the Misty Mountains by the proper path, or else you will get lost in them, and have to come back and start at the beginning again (if you ever get back at all)." Gandalf...The Hobbit .

Sounds like a hexcrawl adventure to me.

[CptClyde]

This is amazing to hear thank you for sharing! I am impressed you took the time to get into the groove of book keeping! It becomes second nature after a couple hours.

[delcidkidv]

I used Chartopia to make a one-click roller for most of the stuff on 3 through 4. https://chartopia.d12dev.com/chart/31187/

[CptClyde]

Cool thanks for your efforts! I rolled like 8 monster encounters before find a Point Of Interest lol I'm always dubious of computer "randomness".