Broadbrush Hex-filling for Hexcrawl25

With the players having wandered around a bit and the ‘shape’ of the play space having come a little more into focus I cycled back around to the greater hex map because their focus now is a little off center for the initial “super-hex”. The red splotch is the broad area of operations for the part to date – threatening to head off out of the super-hex to the west or north west.

Most recently for this Hexcrawl25 I have been populating sub-sub-hexes based on the factions present in sub-hexes and neighbouring sub-hexes which is a zoomed-in approach that works well for generating more detail from coarse understanding of hexes. It is failing me when I come to the edge of the hexes and am missing any detail on the neighbour to interact with. I need to zoom back out to come up with broad-brushstrokes and then delve down to details again.

I followed three principles here:
1. Zooming out to look at and honour the terrain of the greater region
2. Conservation of NPCs/factions towards what he players had encountered to date
3. Go to the good stuff first.

Honour the terrain

I did a brush back over the hexes in the direction of activity and l looked at the culture, religion, biome and national maps from Azgaars.

Some things dropped out like borderlands, biome-changes and terrain continuities to interesting places among other things. These helped to feed a dedicated ‘spark list’ for all the sub-hexes, which combined with some factions and some bleed-over, should serve to populate what I need.

Conservation of NPCs/factions

Another principle to stick to will be to have the people, places and things players revealed to date come back around. This serves to keep the play-space comprehensible for the players as opposed to devolving into noise as it would if each rock lifted reveals new and unrelated stuff.

Go to the good stuff first

This final principle, recalled in that finest of thinking environments, the shower, is to go to the good stuff first. Though a hexcrawl is potentially about journeys, having interesting things far away puts a high risk of distraction or diversion on the table. All that good stuff may never come into play as things along the way get dealt with.

I tagged all of the A sub-hexes with their theme – something had been chosen or diced up for most except A11, A12 and AE. I had gotten some hints on C hex because adventure had already lead players to the shared AC sub-hex but the high risk of the borders of C hex and D hex getting visited in the near term or for the party to hare off after rumoured villains in F hex are what drove this entire effort.

With hex ‘A’ well served already, I figured that coming up with a handful of interesting hexes for each of the surrounding large hexes would suffice to capture the flavour of those places and then let me figure out what would be in the border-lands of them. I had an overall theme for each of these hexes generated using Deck of Worlds but when I was at table I found that really did not give me enough. The most representative thing for each hex is likely not sitting directly on the border of that hex, but things that represent it may well do.

So for each of the hexes I gave myself eight entries, put any notable terrain from Azgaars on it, listed any key features from the Deck of World generation, listed any obvious residents based on terrain, neighbours, etc. This was terrain-driven (principle 1) and location-driven (principle 3) with previously encountered factions and NPCs layered in around those (principle 2).

One thing I decided to do here was to stick to the same ruin styles / epochs of buried history for the most part; a historical equivalent of conservation of NPCs. There are a couple of past epochs that have been discovered through various campaigns but for this patch of the world we will say that only a few of them have left any traces – those that have already been encountered.

For some of the locations, the lists filled themselves and I was left with ideas which I then doubled-up – a terrain feature plus a show-case bunch of residents, for example. Where I still needed some ideas I had a thought about reactions to or splinters of the main group or activities present; the village beneath the great monastery, the illegal copyists near another monastery, the centaur tribes likely to be present on the nearest flat terrain, etc.

B: Wildwoods
1 – Dryads, maddened by drought
2 – Ruins unearthed by earthquake
3 – Taiga nomads w/ weird petty god
4 – uttermost wilderness – predators
5 – wizard most lonely, deliberately sought isolation
6 – tundra nomads, duchy pledged, same traditions as hakkatorex khaganate to north
7 – hakkatorex ruin divers
8 – centaur tribes

C: Lake of Answers – giant otters; tritons, humans, halflings
1 – temperate rainforest
2 – wetland hills
3 – lake edge w/ pikefolk (sahuagin)
4 – lake islands w/ communes
5 – monastery
6 – skulking smuggler gangs
7 – relic raiders
8 – illegal copyists

D: Hissing Valley – uruk, snakefolk
1 – Uruk contesting kings
2 – Pilgrimage train of the martyrs of the new gods
3 – Uruk mines, poorer, harder driven
4 – Smith-king of the Uruk in Great dome of the dwarven ancients, mighty forge
5 – Shrine of the ancestors – trains the youth
6 – Clearances of villages for more mines
7 – War-profiteers and arms merchants
8 – Fortress ahove the taiga; guarded ore routes, not faces invasion

E: Meandering Mountains
1 – Skalds college – factions
2 – rare fruit of magical power
3 – reliquary of kiranshalee paladin
4 – village beneath the great stairs to the monastery
5 – Uruk hunting grounds
6 – great smelters of the uruk w/ undead miners
7 – greatest of the Uruk chiefdoms w/ priests
8 – floating mountain peaks w/ hermits and rebels

F: Marsh that Remembers – Borderlands
1 – tomb of duchy hero
2 – duchy stronghold; border watch
3 – duchy templar hold – adapted to fight kirianshallee
4 – fortifications – defence in depth
5 – cultivated monster lairs
6 – abundant poison plants
7 – thriving herbalist/alchemist outlaws
8 – old battlefields

G: Bayou – orthodox, wetlands – standard mix
1 – ruined capital
2 – uncovered road of ancient empire
3 – black dragon cultists (settler infiltration)
4 – settlers – hakkatorix
5 – black dragon lair in stub of ancient fortress (settlers want them gone)
6 – duchy rangers, badly outnumbered
7 – druids of the old ways (blood thirsty)
8 – unseelie labyrinths

These should provide a decent enough level of detail for each hex that I can define contents for sub-hexes (C6, C12, C13 or B5, B11, B12) that will be coherent with their full hex and give me enough to engage sub-hex populating techniques again.