I’ve had hex crawls on the brain again lately, and I had a bit of an epiphany some months ago while I was playing with my three-year old son and his magnetic building tiles. It’s no major revelation or anything, but I simply noticed and remembered that hexagons are made of triangles. One can make a hexagon out of an arrangement of six equilateral triangles. Simple, right? It got me thinking about what it might look like if one made not a hex crawl map, but a triangle crawl.
Much digital ink has been spilled over the years regarding the merits of whether 5 mile hexagons should be used for hex crawls, versus 6 mile hexagons, versus 10 miles, versus 704 yards, versus 26 miles… or whatever. I think the best answer to that question is whatever suits you and the literal scale of your campaign. But, what if one considers designing a map that had been subdivided into 3-mile triangles?
The One League Triangle
There is much to recommend 3 miles as a measuring segment. First, three miles is basically the length of a league. “League” is one of those measurements that has varied a lot over the centuries, depending on one’s location and era, but the general idea of the modern league is that it’s the distance a person can walk in an hour: roughly three miles. You can even try this one yourself if you’d like: if your phone has a pedometer/odometer of some variety, fire it up and go for half hour walk at normal pace on roughly level ground and see how far you go. Chances are, it’ll be somewhere around a mile and half-ish. Sure, there’s plenty of variation depending on what your personal level of fitness is, or whether you’re carrying a backpack full of splatbooks and metal dice, or are unencumbered with merely your keys and a phone. The point is that it’s not a precise, mathematical distance, but a utility distance. If the village of Thorpbottom is three leagues away from Castle Chutney, it’s easy to tell how long it would take to walk between the two sites, assuming there’s an adequate trail or road. So, instead of worrying about whether the hexagon is six miles wide, or five miles wide, just consider it two leagues wide. For many of us, that’s a six mile hex. If you are Jules Verne, using the French metric league, it ends up being an eight kilometer hex, which is a touch under five miles.
Filling A Hex: One “Thing” Per Triangle
Considering a map hex to be made up of six triangles can also be a useful way to populate the hex. Part of the usefulness of Geoffry McKinney’s Carcosa and Isle of the Unknown is that both works feature large hexmaps with descriptions of something in each hex, but a tricky bit for the GM is to determine what else might be found in the location. McKinney’s 10-mile hexes are pretty big after all, and there’s probably more for characters to find other than a cyborg stegosaurus surrounded by five miles of flat, featureless desert. As part of last summer’s Carcosa planning, I used a die-drop method to fill out the details of the hex occupied by my “dungeon.” While I should write up the specifics of that method some other time, consider this as an abbreviated version:
First, subdivide the hexagon into six equilateral triangles. Then, assign the following six features to the six triangles, one feature per triangle, in any order or sequence you prefer:
- A place people live
- NPC(s) on the move
- Monster(s) on the move
- A lair or adventure site
- A natural feature or landmark
- Something useful
Presumably a GM would use their random table to choice for populating these features, but, as always, one could make it all up extemporaneously. The first feature, “A place people live,” is basically a village, or some kind of settlement populated by harmless (or at least “neutral”) NPCs where the characters could probably find a meal and shelter. These are also the folks that might be menaced by some local threat, and would gripe about it to passing adventurers. This might be useful to include even in deep “unsettled” wilderness hexes– perhaps instead of a human lumber camp, it’s a gnome village, or a gathering of Ents spending a few months in the midst of a “short” conversation.
An “NPC on the move” is basically a random encounter with friendly/neutral humanoids– not necessarily someone to fight, but then again you never know with players. This could be something as basic as a pig farmer headed back to the village after tracking down an escaped sow, or maybe it’s Sir Poncyweather and his retinue on their way to Wensleydale for the annual joust held on the Feast of St. Willoughby. Maybe it’s even a group of snake cultists who are in a mostly peaceful recruiting mood, wondering if the PCs have heard the Good News about Father Set. The idea is that it’s someone “in motion” the PCs can chat with, rescue, etc. Maybe they’ll make a friend, or maybe they’ll make an enemy. Who knows?
“Monster on the move” is the corollary to the wandering NPC; it’s your basic wilderness encounter with something the party might have to fight or avoid. If you’re working improv mid-game, it could probably just be a standard random encounter suitable for the environment. If you’re got some time to plan, though, it might be something associated with a nearby lair or dungeon. Maybe it’s a patrol of orcs from Blackfang Citadel, or a Giant Ant scout that’s wandered from the vanguard. Maybe it’s even a “major” monster, like the Red Dragon that lairs a few hexes over, deep within Mount Menace. In that case, it might just be a “sighting” rather than a “fight”– something to act more as a cinematic signpost to tell the players that a dragon lives somewhere up north in a more interesting way than having some scruffy ditch digger wave his shovel and say “a dragon lives up north!” It’s a “Chekov’s Dragon” situation, I guess: it makes an appearance on stage here in Act I, so the players know it’s “in play” and might show up later for Act III when they head to Mount Menace.
“Lair or adventure site” is just some place that the players can go raise a ruckus and find some treasure. Maybe it’s simply a cave with a grumpy ogre, or maybe it’s an elaborate, seven level Dungeon with some Dragons. Maybe it’s not actually a totally hostile location, and is the Castle of Baron Kalgore, the Queen’s evil cousin who is busy trying to burn some tax-evading peasants out of the local woods. In any case, the “lair” is intended to be where the action is, and where the XP will be earned.
“Natural feature or landmark” is set-dressing… something the characters will walk past or through during their travel montages. Maybe it’s a nice lake, or rocky bluff on the plain. It could be a mundane ruin, or some sign of the era before. Maybe it’s like the remains of the Watchtower of Whatever from Fellowship of the Ring— not intrinsically an adventure site in that there are dungeons to explore, but someplace that might make for a good backdrop, campsite, etc. It could be something the characters will remember for later… like a box canyon to lure the bandits into for an ambush.
Finally, “something useful” is similar to the landmark in that it’s mostly mundane, but might be something the characters can come back to later, or use as a resource. Maybe it’s a source of drinkable water in desert, or outcropping of interesting mineral oxide that indicates this might be a good site for a mine. Maybe it’s an old graveyard still consecrated as holy ground that the local vampires cannot enter, or a shrine to a half-remembered saint that gives one extra HP of healing per night when the party sleeps within the grotto. Maybe it’s even just “easy money”– an old skeleton riddled with goblin arrows, but still clutching a gleaming silver sword, or a hollow tree with a dusty pouch of rubies stashed in it years ago. Maybe it’s a patch of edible mushrooms, or a place where the Jade Lotus grows. It’s just… well, “something useful,” whether or not the players recognize it as such.
Anyway, it seems like regarding a hex as a cluster of “six interesting things” might be a method that could work well at the table mid-game if the party ends up wandering off in an unexpected direction. You don’t even need to have something for all six sections– maybe just three or four of them could be occupied, depending on how “dense” you want the map to feel. A “monster on the move” might be redundant with your preferred method for random encounters, and similarly you might find that “something useful” and “landmark” can just be mashed together into one feature, like a freshwater lake with edible berries growing on its banks. And because it’s just a map of relative geographic “relationships,” where everything is generally an hour-ish walk away from its neighboring feature, you can just take some good notes and tighten up the geography after the game when you update the “official” campaign map.
Let me know if you get the chance to put the idea to the test… in the meantime, maybe I should start making a few lists and random tables to seed this sort of gameplay, since ideas like this tend to only work as well as the encounter tables supporting them in the background!