How to run "empty" hexes in your hexcrawl adventures!

Transcript

I recently posted a video exclaiming that no hex is empty. We speak about empty hexes, but the reality is that the hexes just don't have keys. Keys being established things that happen when you enter the hex or that exist in that hex depending on what the key is. And you could check out that video where I run through a little bit about different sorts of keys, what they mean, and what the upshot is about your hex-map. But there's still the issue of, well, what do you do with all these empty as in unkeyed hexes? And, specifically, what do you do with them when your party is out on the crawl, as it were, and they're passing through empty hexes. The first thing is I'm gonna make which I often do is I'm gonna make a comparison to dungeons and dungeon crawling because I think that we wanna treat hex crawling and dungeon crawling as really two vastly different things. And, of course, they are different. But in many ways, they're very similar. And in the same way, we we look at a corridor, say, a length of corridor, and think about that in terms of how we would describe it, narrate it, how much time that would take. It really isn't much different to saying, okay. Here you are in an empty hex. Empty again. Unkeyed. And presuming the party is not searching that hex, but they're moving through it. Essentially, they're creating their own corridor moving in whatever direction they're going from where they were through this hex into another hex.

So if you think of a dungeon and a dungeon crawling, you think about, well, I've got a 20 feet of corridor that the party is gonna traverse during their ten minute dungeon crawling turn. I probably already have mentioned the stonework, but maybe it's different. Maybe it's not. If it's the same as places they've been, then then I'll either remark that it's the same or I might just not say anything at all and say, oh, the hallway continued. And then if there's nothing intriguing or they don't interact with anything and they're waiting to see what happens when they get to the next intersection, that next decision point, well, then we just move on ahead. And if you think about in your own games when you're at the table, how long does that take? Might take you thirty seconds. If the party's doing a lot of digging around, searching for traps, really checking things carefully, and there's a lot of different elements that they are intrigued by or interested in, then it might take a lot longer.

In the same way, when you're traveling through a hex that has no key in it and there's no wandering creature in it, then it's the same kind of thing. Could take ten, fifteen seconds. Hey. The forest continues. You move for a few more hours, and you get to whatever's next. Or there is something going on, and the party wants to interact with these different elements. Oh, tell me about the trees. What is that? Why is that the birds aren't singing? Or there's a lot of birds or there's a lot of insects or there's no insects or what's going on? And they start to want to dig into those details, then, of course, it could take a lot longer. So the question is, well, they've entered that hex. Unlike in a dungeon corridor where you may have a good mental idea in your head over what that corridor looks like, maybe you don't with the wilderness.

You could set up basically an inspirational image gallery that you can have. Get some images of some forest if they're in a forest or some grasslands or some swamps or some hills, mouths, wherever. Go into your search engine of choice and browse through for images and just drag them all into some kind of whiteboard or you could use a slideshow software, whatever you've got, a Word document, doesn't really matter. Or just in your desktop, throw them in a folder that you could click on them and and put them in your image viewing software of choice. Get them up there. Queue them up. Okay. They're in the forest. Get those ideas there. Another thing you can do, which is probably what I'm gonna spend more time on in this video, is looking at the environs and using that to build in some elements that you can call upon in terms of narrating the journey through a hex.

This journey through a hex can be short. It can be long. There's no prescribed time, and I think a mistake can be if you get into this habit of trying to elongate out your narration of a hex because you you need to fill time or you want to fill time. You really shouldn't do that. If there is nothing of note, if you've already gone through and explained what all the woods surrounding areas are like and there's nothing new to report, don't invent ways to slow things down. Just move to the next decision point. And that decision point might be in the next hex. It might be multiple hexes down the line depending on what's happening, and that's okay. My main inspiration for actually making this video was the binge watching I've been doing of expedition Bigfoot.

Of course, they don't seem to ever find Bigfoot. I think I see it. Because he sees you too but they run into all kinds of other stuff, and it occurred to me that a lot of what these folks are doing when they're running around in these areas is they're kinda hex crawling. They've got this target, which is Bigfoot, and they assume that Bigfoot is in a particular area, and then they start canvassing the area. And sometimes they run into clues of Bigfoot. Sometimes they run into nothing at all, and sometimes they run into other things. I mean, usually, other things tend to get ascribed to Bigfoot whether whether there is a Bigfoot or not. Whether it's something else or not doesn't matter. It becomes sign of Bigfoot, and then, of course, they go running off into the night because they usually do this stuff at night, almost always at night. Why always at night? I don't know, but that's how they do it. It occurred to me that they're taking this terrain, which is interesting. They're not going to boring places. I don't know that any really wilderness or any of these areas are are really boring. But, you know, they're they're in the Pacific Northwest somewhere in some mountainy, hilly, cragly area there in.

I think they did one in Appalachia where it was really full of ridges and those hollers and hollows and valleys. And they went to Alaska where these little islands, and, again, it's kind of mountainous and hilly. They're all interesting areas. And I think from a gaming perspective, from a fantasy perspective, that works really well. I mean, our areas, I think, should be interesting unless the interestingness is in the fact that they are very bland or vast, like a desert. I think part of the a desert as a challenge is the fact that it isn't super interesting in terms of there being stuff. It's there might be stuff, but it's all hidden away. It's all covered in this under the sands or hidden in the rocks or these other things that make it look like, my gosh, we're just in this totally barren expanse. That's kind of part of the effect of a desert, and that can be part of an effect of any terrain you're in. And, of course, you wanna build it into all your descriptions.

But in terms of thinking about what kind of little parts of character do I wanna pop into my hex narration to make part of the landscape, we wanna lean into interesting stuff. We wanna lean into the stuff that is going to either peak players' interest or build into themes or reinforce what we're doing or where we are. So if you are in a the forest of the evil necromancer, then you wanna build on the fact that, okay. There's a necromancer here, so let's make this forest necromancery, whatever we think that means.

I've got here a map open in Worldographer. I just use the generational tools just to throw some stuff out on the map. I haven't touched it at all. We have a few locations here. We've got some cities or towns. We got some more towns. We have various towers and, think in a camp, and it looks like we have another city over here. Got some villages. I think we might have another town over here. We have a monster. We got some kind of monster going on here. We've got some kind of temple or other looks like a religious structure over here. I think this monument here represents a tomb. So we have some interesting locations going on. I'm not really gonna talk too much about the settlements, though the same kind of rules will apply or guidelines, I should say, if you're talking about approaching a settlement versus approaching a ruin or a monster lair or a dungeon of some kind.

Look at the places that are around and then use those places to sprinkle in amongst whatever you're doing their traces. If you have a point of interest nearby and then some range of hexes, and you can do this mechanically, programmatically, procedurally. If you wanted to look at the power level of wherever you're going, that could that could determine the spread out, or you can just do it by feel or whatever you like. The more powerful a place is, the more important, more dangerous, the more bigger, badder, bolder, stronger the creature that lives in a place will be, the more the terrain around them will be affected by their presence. And that effect can be any number of things, but they're gonna do something. They would classic example, if you have a red dragon layering on the mountain, think about, well, what does the mountain around that dragon layer look like for a red dragon? It's probably like the surface of the moon. Everything's been burnt away, and there's just craters, and maybe there's magma and lava, and it's just smoking ash. Nothing lives. Nothing moves. Desolation. The desolation of Smaug, if you will.

Another creature on the good side say look at a unicorn. And in the the movie The Last Unicorn, you might recall, there was traces. You would enter a wood, and you would see how beautiful was that spring was still here even though it wasn't anywhere else because because it was fall everywhere else. But you get here and it's still like it's spring or summer or things are just the flowers are even more in bloom or just everything's just bigger and bolder, the colors, the the the health, the the nature just seemed to be on a different level. And now it's because the unicorn was there. And even though you might not see the unicorn, you get the sense that something's here that is, in this case, preserving this terrain, whereas in the dragon's case, something's here that is laying waste or has laying waste or keeps it as a waste, the terrain. So we're gonna take one of these as an example to start.

We're gonna take this. This is a tiger. That's what Worldographer gave me. It doesn't have to be. You could have it be something else. Here, you might say the key for this hex is the tiger lair. Up to you philosophically whether you wanna have it be someone that needs to be found, that they need to search the hex for, or whether it's gonna be obvious once they get to the hex. For our purposes in this video, it's neither here nor there. But what we can say is that this tiger, the lair is here. We have all these hexes around it that are unkeyed. There's nothing particular in here. I'm just x ing them up. Now we know in our world that tigers actually roam far away. You can use that if you wanna suggest that this tiger is roaming for a thousand miles. I don't remember the numbers, but I know they're pretty vast when they talk about, I think, in India and in Siberia. Their range can be really vast. I'm not gonna worry about that. What I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna put some more x's here and say, okay. I'm gonna say that the range of this particular tiger fills these hexes. So what does that mean for us? What we can say is that if the party is moving from one of these locations, and they're moving through these hexes. Let's say they're following the river, following this river. Oh, the river kinda vanishes, but they're coming around, and they're trying to get to this town over here. Here's the path they're taking in blue. And putting aside also the fact that they might get lost or what have you. There's a river they're following for this, so I'm going to just assume. It's not important. We can assume that they can follow the water back to the source, whatever spring, and then maybe they know the way or they just find their way. It doesn't matter. But you can see here they're traveling through this tiger's range. But what do we do with that information?

I'm not gonna spend a lot of time in a particular session walking through these two plane hexes that they're starting in. So they start here in hex number one, and they're gonna move to hex number two. I might cover these hexes in one statement because other than maybe finding the river, if they are, though, again, it looks like and I'm I'm I'm not gonna fiddle with the map. They can follow the river all the way through. I'm not gonna spend a whole lot of time in describing these two hexes. The reason I'm not is because they have a unity of terrain. It's grasslands. I'm gonna make the assumption you would make the assumption for your world that there's nothing particularly different. It's all the same expanse of grassland. They're just moving from one part of it to another. Remember, the hexes don't have any impact on the actual terrain. It's an abstraction. The map is not the territory. It's just an expanse of grasslands that's in this pocket between the hills to one side and the woods to the other. That's what I'm gonna explain. And if there is no real decision point, then the only thing I might do in that instance is just mark the time passing. You spend one expedition turn moving northwards. You're hugging to the river. The river is following through the grasslands. I might wanna sprinkle in if I think that the nature of the grasslands might be changing. Maybe I've decided that it becomes there's a little bit more wooded as they're going north because we're gonna be entering into woods.

And remember, these hexes of grasslands, it does not mean that the hex is wall to wall grass and there's no trees or nothing else but grasslands there. There's gonna be different terrain types. It's just that grasslands is the most prevalent or the one that when you're looking down from a satellite, you might pick out if you had to ask yourself, you gotta pick one terrain. What is it? And you look down and say, hey. It's probably more grasslands than anything else, so it's grasslands. That's all that means. So I might mention a little about that if I wanna talk about more pockets of trees and maybe something going on the river, and that might be it. I might also look at it. And, of course, the context of what the party is doing is gonna matter. If they're running for their lives, then they might miss some of the signs of the tiger, and then they're just running through the grasslands. However, I'm gonna assume let's just say, in this case, they're being careful and they're looking for stuff, then I might talk about there could be old truck tiger tracks. There might be an old kill site. It might not be obvious that it's a tiger if it's a kill site. Just might be bleached bones out in the sun. Maybe they'd see some claw marks, tooth marks. If they check them out, they might just see them.

Those are things I can put out there. Scat is another one. They might find some scat. If they're looking for hairs, Bigfoot folks are always looking for hairs, always finding hair somewhere. Maybe the party is going through some tall grasses and might talk about hairs or some kind of nest or sleeping area that they found. These are all things that they could run into that not only are ways just to make the place feel a little bit lived in, but they're also clues to the fact that there might be some kind of large predator. Aside from the tiger, we do have some settlements. These are, of course, also going to influence things we can talk about. Not only are there traces of the tiger gonna be there, but we're gonna find people, farmsteads, little hamlets, things that aren't important enough to make it on the map but are here. It could be that these grasslands are really mostly farmlands or at least farmland plus maybe a lot of pasture. There might be other woodsmen and folks who work kind of in the wilds bringing resources back, the woodcutters, the hunters, furriers, farriers, furriers, trappers, all those folks all those folks that are out there working the edges edges of the settled lands, they're also gonna be moving around. And they can also be there or at least traces thereof.

You might find an old horseshoe, a part of a leather a boot, an old campsite, an abandoned shack or house, a little graveyard. These are all things that people leave behind or that they make space when they leave. If there used to be some little farmstead with a family and the family died and maybe the kids moved away, then those elements will still be there, but now nature's taken over. So it's no longer a settlement, but the thing is still there. In the expedition Bigfoot show, they at the end of one of the seasons, they ran across a whole bunch of stuff from a settlement, a mining settlement, I believe, that hadn't been hadn't been around for a hundred plus years, but they found an old cemetery, an old graveyard. They found abandoned houses. They found abandoned machinery. All these things that were really interesting and intriguing, they helped tell the story of the place. Much like all these other things you're telling us the story of the place, what is it about these particular grasslands? Well, there's a there's a tiger or family of tigers that use this area. There's also people that use this area. And maybe we could think of a few other things that pop up in this area. We might look at, well, what other creatures are there? There might, you know, antelope or deer or bears or wolves or whatnot. And they don't necessarily enter in actively into what's happening, but they can help add the character to the place.

And you can add as much or as little of this as you want to. It could just be a note. It can be a reward for a player taking an action. Maybe you look at it and go, well, they're searching and there's nothing here for tracks, but then you go, oh, wait a minute. Oh, maybe there was nothing specifically here, but I know this tiger's here, so maybe they find some old tiger tracks. Maybe they find something else, something else that I can reward them. Maybe they find a pathway that someone from one of these settlements made going somewhere or other, and that can be someone they can find. All these little elements can help you bring things alive, make them feel like, yeah, there are people and creatures who are living here, who are doing things here apart from whatever the party's doing. They don't have to be formalized into keys. You can deploy them as much or as little as necessary. It can be something that you wait until the players ask for before you deliver.

So you're moving through these grasslands, and somebody says, it's interesting. I know that there are some settlements to the west of here. Are any of those folks moving around these grasslands? And then you say, oh, yeah. Of course. Sure. There are folks moving around. You see people on the down the river, up the river slightly. You can see looks like someone on a with a fishing pole on a barge. Or, oh, yeah. You can find you find traces of some game trails that show booted prints that show that maybe some folks in the village come by. You could hear them maybe. There's of course, there's always birdsong and these other elements or howls from, our calls of just all kinds of different creatures. You don't have to be preloading that all into these hexes. You can give the general layout, see how interested your players are in these details. If these details don't have anything to do with them and they're in a hurry, they got places to go, people to see, and tie tigers and villagers don't enter into it, then you might throw it out there just in case, but then move on along. It's all good. Don't worry about it.

And this is the advantage of not prepping all the stuff ahead of time. It's good to prep the tools to get an idea of your map to understand. I've got Creature A over here. I've got Place B over here, and I can see about where the influence of these things are in my setting, but that's all I need to do. Maybe you might make some notes for a tiger. Assuming it's a fantastic creature, maybe you need a little bit of inspirational, but time to prepare. Well, I know kind of the stuff that tigers leave behind, but what does a troll leave behind? What does a troglodyte leave behind? What does some what does a manticore leave behind? I might need to think about that a little bit. So make yourself a few notes and say, okay. Well, let's just say this is a manticore lair. Well, manticores fly, and I and depending on your version, they they sometimes what they shoot spikes out of their tail, and they do some different things. Okay. Well, maybe you find a kill site and you put a large spike in there. You might not tell the party it's a spike. You could make it sound like it could be a horn, could be a claw. We don't know, but it's straight and, you know, whatever. However a manticore's spike looks to you, but then that's intriguing.

And maybe they go into it, maybe they don't. But either way, there's the place is gonna look a little bit more alive to them, and you didn't have to do much. I think, ultimately, a lot of the things that I try to convey in these videos is you can do a lot without having to do too much. You've keyed up maybe 30 or 50% of your hex. You've got these empty spaces around or at least unkeyed areas around them. Instead of worrying about why I need to fill all those up and I need to put stuff in them, otherwise, they're gonna feel dead and empty and just bare. No. Use the stuff you've already prepped to inform the stuff you haven't prepped.

So we've prepped the tiger. We've prepped this city over here. We've prepped this burial area over here. Now we can just lean on those to fill in the gaps in these areas. And then you can decide based on context, based on what's happening, what the party's doing, what they're trying to do, if that context is obvious enough that they're going to find it, you might say that, well, look. These huge grasslands here, chances of them running into the tiger tracks almost nil unless they're looking for them. Fair enough. Then don't present it. But if the players say they're specifically looking for that stuff because maybe they're afraid of getting ambushed by some beast or they just wanna know what kind of nature's around, then you have that to lean on. And you know your map. You've got some understanding of the area of operations. So you can pull and say, oh, yeah. This is definitely where they are is definitely in range of that tiger. So, yeah, for sure.

By the same token, if they're trying to get here to this tomb area and you decided that between these hills and these mountains that are here. In this hex this grassland hex, they're not there's a wall, basically. They are not gonna find traces of this burial thing way over here. That's fair. That's great. But you have other things. You've got the tiger to call on here. You've got these settlements to call on here. You've got this monument over here that may represent some kind of religious area, and there might be something here. It would make sense if there's some kind of monument or some kind of ritual space that there's gonna be a path. I mean, who used this space? It's possible that it was from south, came in this way. So maybe these guys didn't use it, in which case you've answered your questions. Like, nope. There's not there's, like, basically a wall here too. It didn't go here. But you could also argue that all these towns maybe all these towns had some kind of road that went to it or both if it was an important regional site, then you might say, yes. There are gonna be traces.

So when the question comes up, when you're looking at your map and you're looking at all these unkeyed hexes and you're nervous or afraid, you just don't know what to do when your party gets there. One, get yourself some inspiration, some descriptions. You can go and look up different ecological systems from Wikipedia and other sources, National Geographic, and there's a bunch of different sources that'll have stuff on that in terms of the flora and the fauna that tends to be there. Go grab some photos and just use them to sort of inspire what you're going to describe to them. Then use the surrounding locations of interest, creatures, lairs, etcetera, to fill in more details as needed and then ultimately wait for the party to either act on those details and become intrigued, in which case you can move down that path or not, and then just move on to the next area. It's okay to move on. Not everything has to be a decision point.

And if the party starts off in this town and they get on the plains and they know they need to follow the river, then there's probably no decision point till they come to those woods. And the only reason I'm putting this decision point here is the woods may give them pause. Maybe they didn't know there were woods here or they weren't expecting there to be woods here. Or just to confirm with them that you're going into woods now and you understand all that, great. Otherwise, then maybe their first decision point actually is where they come to where this water they've been following ends. And now they need to do more navigation. Now they need to do more figuring out to position themselves. Do they know where they're going from here? Do they need to start investigating to see what else is going on? This is all fine. And if you cover this whole journey from this hex to this hex and you cover it in five minutes or thirty seconds or ten minutes or an hour, it's all good. There's no one right answer. The only answer is, is everybody having fun? Is is everybody engaged in the game? Great. Does that take a long time or a little time or a medium amount of time? I don't know. And it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter.

Hopefully, this helps you. Let me know in the comments any other questions, ideas, comments, your procedures. Do you got any tips and tricks that you can pass on to me that I can pass on to others? Let me know. Other than that, that's all I've got everybody. So game on, and I'll talk to you later. Bye now.