A Dungeon before a Hexcrawl
As many of you recall, 2023 began with quite the bang as plenty cracked open their fancy, grid-lined, handy-dandy notebooks and began their #dungeon23 journey. For some, including myself, this was a bit more of an arduous task than initially expected. Unfortunately, most of us gave up well before even the midpoint of the year.
I think that the main reason why the majority of us lost steam with crafting this dungeon on the day by day is that we didn’t feel very grounded in the exercise. Without characters to march into these dark and scary catacombs it all feels sort of moot. I think that a Hexcrawl with the potential for growth and development will be different in this way. Not only will there be random lands and locations to bring forth a setting randomly, but having parties to explore and do things that shift the world forward will make everything feel that much more alive. As many of you likely know, I run the podcast in this general sort of way. This procedural form of play has been the most revolutionary move I have made as a player of TTRRPGs in the last 20 years of play. It seems to me that having a low-stakes, all fun and games, daily exercise across all modes of old school play will ignite that feeling of fun twice over.
Before the Crawl
So, as with Dungeon23 journey there will need to be rules to keep this whole process in line. Let’s lay out some ground rules, with many put forward by the originator of this Hexcrawl24 movement, Monsters and Mazes (link below).
1. 1:1 Time; One day in game is one day in the real world. Simple. That means no skipping ahead and playing out January 2nd unless it really is the 2nd. Tedious to some, but it makes it that much easier to pace myself and to really enjoy the experiment of a world slowly taking shape.
2. Procedural generation; It shouldn’t be any sort of a surprise, but I won’t be designing this world with much direction or railroading. Instead I’ll be using some generators, tables, and other such random resources. This world isn’t my creation, but I’ll be doing my best to make sense of what the dice tell me. My first choice of generators that I’ll be using for the majority of this exercise is the Wilderness Hexplore by Jed McClure. I’ll likely be tossing in a few others as well, and as I do I’ll be recording it in the blog.
3. Record Keeping; For all of this to be effectively recorded, I’ll need to take some good notes on what’s going on on the day by day. Each hex will be defined, each party will have their actions detailed, and all of the story and setting growth will be written concisely and as is necessary.
4. Old School Rulez; I plan on running this using Old School Essentials, my favorite of the OSR movement rule systems. For additional rules and monsters I’ll be using the original BX rules and books including the Creature Catalog, AD&D monster manuals, including the Fiend Folio. Nothing quite beats old school when it comes to solo play, and honestly the OSR has revitalized my love of RPGs altogether so consider this all a big love letter to the greats.
The Hexcrawl Begins
Although it may seem a little silly and contrary to my previously stated rules for this project, I decided I would create a little background for the campaign. None of this background will truly impact the project moving forward, but I think it offers a good bit of substrate to maybe draw from and to frame the future narrative. I’ll post the bits of the background in the next post in this series.
Chronicles of a Hexcrawl
As of right now, I’ll be personally recording the events of the daily routine in a Google Doc, but I’ll be journaling (hopefully) weekly the progress of the project here on the blog. I plan on using Hexographer to record the map, and I’ll post pictures of the Hexcrawl in the blog as well.
Monsters and Mazes Blog:
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