#hexplore Before We Begin - Introducing the First Party

     Well, the time has finally come along. Let's get crackin' on this hexcrawl.

Some last minute notes before it all begins...

Consulting the Oracle... 

One thing that will certainly come up a lot during all of this crawling, is the need to decide on certain actions. Will they trust the hag? Will the dragon see them in this hex? Will they turn back now that they've run out of water?

As I have done in the podcast, I will be borrowing YUM DM's d6 Oracle, where I will be rolling a d6, and based on what value I get, I will have an answer somewhere between or around yes and no. 

1. Yes BUT

2. Yes

3. Yes AND

4. No BUT

5. No

6. No AND

So, as per the previous examples I might run into a result such as: Will they trust the hag? No but they will follow her cautiously from a distance. Will the dragon seem them in this hex? Yes and it will follow them from afar back to town.

EZPZ.

Building the Parties...

One part of this process that was a bit more fun than initially anticipated was drawing up the parties randomly. Sure, I could have hand picked what groups would do well, but where's the fun in that? So instead I used a random number generator and pulled the characters into groups of 6/7 until I had 8 groups in total. I then rolled another d8 to see which lucky group would be first out there into the big bad wilderness. 

We had some interesting balance issues in some parts with some parties having a much greater chance of survival in a wilderness than a dungeon, and vice versa. Some groups have a few evil characters within them, which I am sure will bring about some tension in the future. But for our purposes here, we only need to focus in on the Gray Party. 

The Gray Party... 

I'll push the character sheets I have in a spreadsheet to the bottom of this post, but this definitely proved to be the most tedious part of the project. Rolling up the coins, using a bunch of different resources for gear, and having to fill in all of those blanks was not exactly the highlight of the journey thus far. 

Those checking the sheets out will see that there are some armor and items not present in the OSE fantasy and advanced fantasy. I always thought it was a shame that the armor and item lists are a little skimpy, so, I started borrowing from AD&D and Labyrinth Lord, and others to add a little additional nuance to this part of character building and growth. Also, I got big lucky with rolling magic missile for my Magic User right off the bat. 

So, without further adieu, I will now begin the crawl. I will likely toss in a post for day 1 just to highlight how the process will go.