My wife left to spend the day in a spa with a friend of hers and I
am listening to Louis Armstrong recordings from the 1930s.
I read a discussion between @munroe@dice.camp and @Da_Gut@dice.camp about hex sizes for a hexcrawl. My personal take is to think of hexes as distances one can travel in a certain time.
Think about the diversity of the landscape one can see in a day of travel. Arable lands and a forest. Two regions? Arable lands, a forest, hills, a plateau. Four? That is the number of hexes per day. And nobody cares about the miles.
In my case, I think that "one hex is one day of walking" makes the most sense. In the morning, you're leaving one hex and in the afternoon you're arriving in the next hex. This assumes an uncharted wilderness. When I try to leave the forest trails in the hills around Zürich or in the Swiss mountains, I feel that progress is really slow. Super slow. Extremely slow. Sure, I can walk as far as the horizon in some cases, but that's on gravel roads prepared by industrial machines and maintained by a state that is fed by all the tax evading billionaires and conglomerates of the whole planet. So out there in Fantasy land, it's more like me trying to find a shortcut in the Swiss mountains and forests.
And sure, if people have horses and mules to carry their stuff, they can travel faster. Twice as fast makes it easy to move the little token around on the map. And roads also speed things up. Like, twice as fast? With horses and mules to carry stuff, on a flat road: 4 hexes per day. If you want to read up on ancient rows, see historic roads and trails on Wikipedia.
Regular exploration of the wilderness where the players are strangers, intruders, colonizers, potential murderers, belonging to the wannabe-conquerors, then surely it's going to be 1 hex per day. This is the equivalent of slow and careful dungeon exploration speed. Avoid getting lost in the bogs, crossing the rivers and creeks without losing your stuff, without getting ambushed in gullies and canyons, without getting lost in forests, without slipping into ravines, spraining angles or scraping your knees, keeping dry, finding good camping sites, digging a latrine, digging a fire pit, washing clothes, maintaining equipment, baking bread, and on and on. This is the speed you can maintain for long expeditions.
Now, you can get into all the nitty-gritty of it all. Luckily, @settembrini@rollenspiel.social already did all that and wrote Inch by inch it’s all a cinch, by the yard it’s hard. It's a long article and not an easy read. But here's one of the things I can put into my gamer notes:
Inch by inch it’s all a cinch, by the yard it’s hard
1 hour’s walk = 1 league = 3 miles = 3000 double paces = 15 000
feet= 5000 yards.
So let's go back to my example. Using the above equivalences, 8 hours of walking takes you 24 miles out in the open, on a road or well kept and straight trail. At the same time, I said that 1 day of walking is 2 hexes in my world, without mules or horses. So now we know: one day of walking is 24 miles and 2 hexes. Therefore my hexes should be 12 miles across, if you really need to know.
But of course you don't because nothing happens "per mile" in the game. All the things happen "per unit of time". The most important one of these is "how many random encounters per day?" Or "per 4 hour watch?"
I'm serious about one thing, however: It's better if you don't think about the miles per hex. If you do, you'll keep thinking about all the other things, too. How far was your hike last summer? Did you have to set up camp? How heavy was your backpack? Did you wear armour? Is travelling by horse really faster than walking by foot if you can't switch horses? How fast are you if you have two horses per person? How fast is a wagon. The questions are endless and somehow I find them all very boring questions. These are not good questions.
It's better if you think about what's important in the game for you and the table and go from there. Is the world dangerous because of random encounters? Start with the question of how often you want to roll for random encounters as the party travels from landmark to landmark. Think about the distances between settlements. Traditionally, that would be about a day's march by foot in arable land: half a day out and do a bit of work and half a day back is the limit.
So let's say you answered the above with "I'm going to roll once for random encounters per day of travel". And every landmark has something: either it's arable land so there are people living there, a camp, a hamlet, a village, or it's dangerous because of a monster lair, or because of a natural hazard like mountains, swamps, deep forest, or something else that's similarly inhospitable.
If you follow this train of thought then you'll arrive at my setup: the slowest speed is one hex per day, and then there are ways to speed things up with transporation methods and infrastructure. Take a boat downriver or along the coast: 8 hexes per day? More? What about taking a boat upriver? Just as slow as walking but you can unlimited supplies? How far can the flying carpet go? All these questions need settling, eventually. All I am concerned about right now, however, is that they can be answered in principle: a certain multiple of the slowest speed is good enough.
The only good argument for switching things up that I can think of is wanting to present more variety to your players. No problem. If the land is full of stuff, a river ford, a tower ruin, then up onto the plateau and into the moors until you reach the cairns of Arguable, you can scale it up. Multiply it all by two or three or four and you're good to go. I find that this leads to a lot more mapping and so I don't do it, but if you feel like it, you have my blessings.
If you are like me and prefer more diversity in theory but cannot be bothered to map in practice, I have a suggestion: start with the sparse map and keep adding. Using the example above, there's a hex with a settlement, and the next hex is hills, and there's a river between the two. You can improvise a story about the fields giving way to brushland, the river winding its way between the willows and the ford with the poles of King Borgobob who raised them in the times of your grandfather, and then there's that plateau. If the players don't look for the tower, it does not show up. But if the players know about the old tower you add a tower symbol to the hill hex and presto, one more landmark in the same hex. They know about the cairn, too? Then it's a tower and a cairn. You can even number the sides of a hex: 1 is north, 2 is south-east, 3 is south-west, and so on. Then your notes can say "1: cairn, 4: old tower" and depending on how the party crosses the hexes, you'll know whether they pass by the thing or wether they can spot it from a distance or whether they'll have to search for it.
I also like to label geographic features. Label settlements, forests, mountains, swamps, rivers, trails. I feel that adds so much.
Down below is a snapshot of the player map in my German Greyhawk campaign where I run the Elredd region on the Wild Coast. How long does it take to travel from Elredd to Moorwies along the Miesbohlenweg? 1 hex/day in the wilderness, 2 hexes/day on the road: From Elredd to Brackmühl is a day, from Brackmühl to Kreuzdorf is a day, and from Kreuzdorf to Moorwies is half a day, or perhaps the swamp slows things down and the road is shit so it's a full day. So three days total. If you had horses, then it's one day from Elredd to Kreuzdorf, and then the shit trackway into the swamp… a second day? Or maybe you can travel right through Moorwies and out of the swamp on the other side. But my players don't know what lies to the west…
OK, but now I have a different problem. @settembrini@rollenspiel.ch says that each hex is 10 km across. Now what? Let's take those equivalences again and add a rough conversion to kilometers. 3 miles × 1½ km/mi = 4½ km or 5000 years × 9/10 m/yard = 4500 m = 4½ km. Let's round that to 5 km – or in keeping with this blog post: a 10 km hex takes 2 h to walk through and in 8 h you can walk through 4 hexes, if you're on a road, 2 hexes cross-country, 8 hexes if you ride on a good road. Speed is sort-of doubled because 12 mi × 1½ km/mi = 18 km which is nearly twice as much as 10 km.
So bow how long does it take to travel from Elredd to Moorwies along the Miesbohlen way? 1 day from Elredd to Kreuzdorf. Plus 2 h on the next day.
1 hour’s walk = 1 league = 3 miles = 3000 double paces = 15 000
feet= 5000 yards = 5 km
My point with all of this: keep in mind how the map relates to events in your hexcrawl procedure. With the "new" ruling handed down to me regarding my map, I keep the idea that there is a single encounter check to be made during the day (and one to be made during the night if the party is camping out in the open).
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(Map generated using Text Mapper with the Bright library)
#RPG #Maps #Hex #Sandbox
@Yora@dice.camp writes:
the best way to avoid introducing fractions again would be to simply switch from a 6-mile hex grid to a 3-mile hex grid. The old hexes per day become hexes per shift and the players can either move two or three shifts in a day. – My Overland Travel Rules adapted for Dragonbane