I'm running Tomb of Annihilation and my players have gotten to the portion of the adventure where they're going to be exploring the jungles of Chult. I've never run a hex-crawl game before.
Do you have any recommendations for running a hex-crawl? How much should I prepare in advance? Should something happen every hex?
The TOA adventure recommends several random encounter rolls a day, which I calculate at being around 50% chance that something happens each hex. I like the idea of my players rolling to see if something happens, but I don't want to have everything made up on the spot. Basically, I don't know how much I should be preparing ahead of time vs letting random encounters happen.
Make encounter table, cross out used encounters. Make them 70% combat, 20% jungle navigation complications, and 10% talky.
Remember a unique encounter can be as simple as xdy goblins appear or "there's no obvious path over the roaring river."
Asher Long
>How much should I prepare in advance? As much as you feel comfortable with, and then a little bit extra.
>Should something happen every hex? No. ESPECIALLY not with 10 miles to a hex as a scale, in an uninhabited wilderness region.
If you want to give your players and yourself the TRUE hexcrawl experience, do everything off random rolls and tables.
There are no preordained encounters. There's no "plot": what happens happens. You're not writing a fantasy novel, you're simulating a real place.
I ran quite a few hexcrawls including good old Isle of Terror, and here's what i learned from the experience:
1: Make sure players have a map. Like, PLAYERS, not characters. Print one. Physical piece of paper. Tell them they can and should write on it everything that's important to them. It's THEIR map. This map should consist largely of unexplored, white space. (like the map you posted, or moreso).
2: Know distances and speeds and weights. How much ground does your party cover in one day, in hexes? What if they move slowly, searching the entire hex (so if there's something significant in it they'll find it), or they blaze through hexes in a hurry? How do forests, rivers, mountains etc modify their speed? What about encumbrance? Moving while hunting/gathering? How far can the party see?
3: A hexcrawl is a simulation. Be unforgiving. Your players will need to track and carry resources. Encumbrance, rations, water. It's a survival game. If you ignore this, the hexcrawl will feel more like a guided tour or a waste of time before the next plot point. The hexcrawl is not an obstacle between the players and the adventure: the hexcrawl IS the adventure.
4: have encounter tables, preferably keyed to different regions. Here be dinosaurs. This valley is inhabited by friendly kobolds and hostile goblins, wild garogyle cavemen live in the mountains, shit like that. Bit by bit your players will learn about the local fauna and inhabitants.
Jason Peterson
Just roll with it man
Anthony Johnson
I appreciate the advice. TOA has basically all that information covered. The players can cover 1 hex every day if moving at normal speed, with increased movement if they travel via canoe on rivers. I've also made it very clear to my players that they're going to have to keep track of supplies and ammo and water. My paladin player replaced his heavy armor with medium armor, so none of the players have to deal with heavy armor in a humid jungle complications.
There's a ton of random encounters in the TOA book (probably 40% of it is dedicated to random encounters and encounters at specific locations). They all look pretty reasonable. I guess I was just concerned about how they're all random, and I'm not confident that my players will like "5 _____s leap out and attack" after the third or fourth time. I've ran pretty linear campaigns in the past where I had basically everything planned out ahead of time, so that's what they're used to.
As far as maps go, I'm going to give them a print out of the OP image. But I also tore out the huge map in the back of the book and laminated it and attached it to some cardboard. I was planning on using sharpies to fill in spaces they had already visited.
Nicholas Taylor
Forgot pic
Cameron Walker
Read this, or at least the parts about hex crawling.
Hey, thanks for this article. I agree with what they were talking about as far as the whole "how to depict an African setting respectfully" thing. I decided that I'd take an angle of "we want to recover our culture that was lost during our time as a colony". I found that it resonated well with the players, even with one girl who is self-described as "woke-as-fuck."
Jaxson Carter
>How much ground does your party cover in one day, in hexes? Is 1 hex/day the standard move rate?
Grayson Sullivan
At the very least that's how TOA handles it.
Thomas Jenkins
Here's another good review of Tomb of Annihilation.
Depends on hex scale. 24 miles/day on foot is typical.
Jeremiah Martinez
24 miles per day is standard for humans in d&d, but realistically it's either very short if you're on good trails without obstacles, or it's very far if you're in trackless jungle.
Just saying one hex per day is a good compromise. You can describe some days as more efficient, in terms of ground covered, and other days as slower, but have it all work out to about a hex a day. For ten mile hexes that leaves some extra time for intrahex-exploration as well.
Adrian Nguyen
So make people go farther on roads and shorter in jungles.
Charles Johnson
Does anyone have any good random tables for interesting environmental situations? TOA has a lot of encounters, but fewer "there's a raging river in your way, how do you cross it?" type-encounters.
Jordan Peterson
You might want to ask in /osr/. They know about random tables and hex crawls.
Aaron Phillips
I’d roll some things first, and try to make something resembling a plot, or at least interesting combat. Honestly, your players will feel bored if you have to roll during the game for every hex, and then just plop and undeveloped encounter in front of them.
Luke Bailey
/osr/ & 5e guy here. Having a look through ToA, there are enough adventure sites to keep things somewhat interesting during travel, but I don't think it holds up very well at a 1/hex a day travel scale.
One of the reasons is that line of site wont reveal a lot of interesting things/make choices meaningful because players can't see shit unless they have found a site that will give them a high vantage.
My personal advice for hexcrawls is that the less you're relying on dice rolls and subsystems to determine where the party goes and more on what they can see and what kind of decisions they can make, the better.
In the case of TOA, and 5e in general, I recommend making all of their "travel checks" for them in secret and letting the game evolve from that. For one thing, there are still major landmarks that they can navigate by (such as the two rivers flowing into the bay of Chult, even though they can still get lost via unmarked tributaries). But at least you take away the abstract (and in my opinion, horribly executed hex rules of TOA) and let them focus on the party.
The other recommendation I can make is that you come up with "special" encounters. TOA is full of content, there is a lot of keyed (stationary) content that your players will find through the course of the module, but random encounters aren't really that interesting with a few NPC encounters.
Use the random encounter table in the back of the book and come up with some interesting situations & mini-maps/plot hooks on some 3x5 cards that you can either roll for or throw in when you feel like your game is lagging (the latter is preferable, especially for TOA and your players won't know the difference.) You can write up mini dungeons or "ruins" with some interesting challenges (combat, social, exploration or otherwise). The beauty is that you don't have to draft an ecosystem because one is already provided for you.
Michael Murphy
I like ten mile hexes and a base speed of 2 hexes per day. -1 hex in heavy terrain -1 hex if you have a cart/wagon +1 hex if you are on a road
This means you have an effective speed of 0 with a cart in heavy terrain. You can solve this problem with engineering - e.g. cut through the jungle to establish a road. The more hirelings you have, the faster this goes. If you don't have time for that, pull a Caesar and bring your supplies on a mule train.
Julian Cox
So I'm a little confused. You're advocating random rolls, but predetermined? Doesn't that remove the whole random element to everything?
I was considering treating high vantage points as a way to say "hey, here's all the locations nearby" kind of like in Assassin's Creed. I'm not sure how to treat line of sight when they're on the jungle floor though, since it's a pretty choked jungle area.
I'm also planning on making the "lost" checks at advantage if it's in an area that's already been explored on their map.
Adrian Campbell
Twenty miles to the hex seems... small.
All of Poland, from the border station in Frankfurt am Oder in Germany, across the entire country of Poland, to the border station of Terespol/Brest in Belarus, is only 20 hexes at 20 miles to the hex.
Christian King
>So I'm a little confused. You're advocating random rolls, but predetermined?
I'm mostly saying that you can't over-rely on purely randomly generated content to make a hexcrawl game interesting/fun. Random tables are there to tax your players and give them agency when they are mostly choosing a path based solely on cardinal directions rather than what they can see about the world around them (because they can't really see shite.) That's why "special" encounters are just great to have if the players are travelling through a particularly empty region, and not all special encounters need to be tethered to a hex location either, so that's less bookkeeping for you.
Climbing up and breaching the canopy won't really tell you much as well, unless they are near the edge of the Aldani basin or there's a mountain range 60 miles or so away. In TOA, certain adventure sites tell you what other sites can be seen at the peak/summit/top of them.
>I'm not sure how to treat line of sight when they're on the jungle floor though
That's part of why I don't think the map holds up very well for hexcrawls (like I said earlier about players being able to see landmarks and make decisions based on that) In RAW (or at least the 5e dungeon master's screen reincarnated) your players are going to be able to see up to 2 miles on the ground floor, but don't treat that like a static number because really, the jungle is so thick and the hexes are so large that they really can't see shit. The best they can hope for is to find a landmark (like a river or a mountain range) and try to use that to navigate. Otherwise what I said about making survival rolls for them stands, if they roll like shit, the players will *know* they're lost and they will make decisions based solely on player knowledge.
I generally make lost checks at advantage if players recognize a landmark (have been there before, have a detailed map, etc) and it's a good idea for the TOA map.
Liam Baker
I mean, I'm not going to go to your house and scream at you for being objectively wrong or anything. But hex maps should NOT be used at that large of a scale EVER unless you are terrible at drawing maps. They aren't for your players to look at and it's MUCH better that your players have an evocative and imprecise map such as this map of Harn, or better yet if they draw their own map.
The advantage of using hex maps is that they make tracking movement far more precise and that you can use tether adventure locations to them. If you stop to think about how large a 20 mile hex is, you then have to think about how much shit you can cram into one and I promise you that if you have 1 adventure site in a 20 mile hex your players are going to pick up on that quickly and tear you apart for it.
It's only worth having a kingdom scale hexmap if you track time properly, otherwise 20 days of travel becomes completely meaningless (especially at that level of play when players have access to magic to mitigate resource scarcity, or if you have truly made a proper hexcrawl with particular regions with their own histories, pitfalls and "milieus")
James White
Read this whole thing, but ignore his abstract rules & 3.x movement speeds.
Ah, ok, now I have a better idea what you mean. Thanks for explaining it further. I think I agree with you: the players need some kind of reference for where to go and what's nearby for their movement to make sense. I'll make sure to keep that in mind. I've already provided a couple of areas that they know they can get good information from (Orolunga and Kir Sabal), and I've already told them about Omu, which I think helps give them a better sense of what they're looking for.
I also have already planned out a handful of encounters that I definitely want the players to experience and I can include whenever I want (for example, Artus Cimber and Dragonbait being chased by a T-Rex).
I'm kind of surprised that the information on running a hexcrawl is only 2 pages long, as this thread has already provided a TON of information that I hadn't considered if I was only using the book.
Luis Jones
>hex maps should NOT be used at that large scale (all of Poland) >Disregard that the map in OP covers an area the size of Poland
whew, i sure appreciate that you won't come over here and yell at me for suggesting something Wizards has already done.
Liam Adams
OP image is not a hex map... sort yourself out.
Tyler Long
are you real right now
i can't tell if im being baited
Wyatt Gutierrez
I usually make a list of about 20 encounters (including non-combat encounters), then pick from them as appropriate. When the scenery changes dramatically, or the party levels up a few times, I swap out those that no longer fit. I replenish the encounters between sessions. Leave an appropriate symbol when the players find an interesting location in the hex, so they can visit it again.
Colton Butler
I read that the Chult map is something like 250k square miles, which is about the size of Texas. I imagine you could cut it down to 5 mile hexes and not have much of an issue, considering the density of the jungle and the difficulty in navigating it.
But does it really matter much about the size? It's all an abstract concept that's just being used as a method to convey movement and to keep track of locations. Seems like the size isn't as important as what/where the players encounter.
Justin Green
>OP image is not a hex map... sort yourself out. >hexes >map >not a hex map checks out
Jordan Perry
>if you have 1 adventure site in a 20 mile hex your players are going to pick up on that quickly and tear you apart for it Can you explain what you mean? Is that not enough action or?
Anthony Morgan
I'm glad to help user, the hexcrawl is my favorite dungeon format. As for the shitty explanation in TOA, yeah WOTC dropped the ball on that one... But to be fair the hexcrawl format has been dead in mainstream games for a long time now and a lot of these insights have been scrapped together from a bunch of blogs and trial and error through play.
It's almost like this hobby has a problem with putting its own oral tradition & intuitive insights to paper.
Cooper James
>whew, i sure appreciate that you won't come over here and yell at me for suggesting something Wizards has already done.
Levi Taylor
Sorry, what I meant to say is that hexes shouldn't be that large, not necessarily the map itself. The hex scale of OPs map is also 10 miles, which is still too large for a plethora of reasons.
Chase Hill
20 miles is too big to only have 1 adventure site in it.
Logan Diaz
Well, I learned from Storm King's Thunder that WotC has a serious problem with handling travel in their games. So I figured I'd check online after reading the hexcrawl instructions and not having all my questions answered.
I really cannot stress how awful the travel portions of SKT were. The book literally said "make sure you put in enough random encounters along the way to make it memorable" without guidelines on how often to do random encounters or any tips on handling continental sized travel. It's all of chapter 3, yet immediately after in chapter 4 they give the players an airship which makes travel super trivial, as if to say "whoops, we only just now realized how miserable walking around is."
Cooper Adams
I think he means that they will travel through as many hexes as possible to pick their favorite adventures... I'm not sure though.
Samuel Foster
So the city where I come from has a zoo with a really terrible "prehistoric park". It has this life-sized dinosaur replicas, several simulated geological landmarks, a large bridge suspended between two protrusions from opposing escarpments and a re-created geological environment.
When I was a kid I got lost in this park and instead of being scared or frustrated, I was absolutely exhilarated. When my dad found me I convinced him that we should wander around and not be too hasty to leave.
So yeah, I love exploring and it's kind of criminal that it's so poorly executed despite being one of Wotzee's "Pillars of D&D". The problem isn't that there's not enough rules for hexcrawling but that the intuitive grasp that grognards have for conveying fantastic adventures isn't expanded on (I still strongly think that rules diminish player agency, sometimes for the good of the game but only if it's absolutely necessary)
Kayden Morales
Sorry, even though I'm on vacation I woke up at 5 to push my girlfriends car out of a snowbank so I'm kind of running on fumes. Your world will seem criminally empty if you only have 1 adventure site per 20 mile hex.
Juan Roberts
>Sorry, what I meant to say is that hexes shouldn't be that large, not necessarily the map itself. The hex scale of OPs map is also 10 miles, which is still too large for a plethora of reasons.
Right, that's what I felt - 20 miles across is a huge area, before the middle ages you'd get entire kingdoms not much bigger than that.
Anthony Kelly
I don't get how anyone can stand to run WOTC adventures. They're so poorly laid out and literally nothing but combat. Oh, it's a sandbox campaign except there's a totally linear story going on that removes all point of running a sandbox!
I wouldn't trust WOTC's hexmap instructions under any circumstances.
Jacob Bailey
>jungles of Chult could be a lot Chulter t bh
Juan Rivera
Care to explain? I'm not familiar with Chult other than how it's portrayed in the recent adventure.
Hudson Scott
not him but I think: Chult >cuh thool Chulter >cuh thooler >cooler
Ayden Russell
Chult is pronounced Ch-ult. His pun is nonsensical.
Robert Murphy
Thanks for all the help everyone! We had our first hexmap game tonight. The first half was spent preparing for the journey and the players hiring guides. The second half involved travel by canoe down the river Soshenstar while we worked out the physical mechanics of when to mark stuff down. My players chose a guide who has a particularly high wisdom score, so it looks like for the time being, they're very unlikely to get lost.
I've also decided that I'm going to make each night's rest count as a short rest rather than a long rest. If they want to long rest, they'll have to spend a day camping and doing light activities, foraging, etc. But it'll have a slightly higher chance of random encounters. I think it'll help get rid of the five-minute adventuring day that I found to be a problem in SKT, and reinforce that being in the wilderness is actually dangerous.
They had an encounter with a faerie dragon that played a couple of pranks on them, which one of my PCs HATED, but they talked to the dragon and convinced it to give them useful information in exchange for teaching it how to spell some cuss words in Dwarvish runes.
Initial impression: I'm really open to this whole "random encounters" thing. Getting the faerie dragon result and then immediately having to figure out what that means on the spot is really fun. It reminds me a lot of when I did improv in college, where someone gives you a theme to base your scene around and you expand from there. So yeah, I'm super looking forward to running more of this.
Jason Miller
You're both idiots. The joke is that the entire middle of the map is blank also it was a last-page bump, I just wrote whatever came to mind.
t. that user
Ayden Cooper
Meant for , not . isn't an idiot.
Asher Perez
Glad to be of help user! I love when we help each other out.
