There's no such thing as an empty hex
Who's afraid of an empty hex?
Hexes are never really empty. Embrace those hexes with undiscovered features and use them for the opportunities that they are!
Transcript
The idea of an empty hex seems to fill GMs with consternation. Let's see what we can do. In my video on how to read a hex key, talked about event based keys. That is the contents of a hex consisted of an event that was generally something one time when you're entering a hex. So you might see a description for something like, there's an old man fishing by the side of the river. He smiles as you approach, but when you get closer, his eyes gleam red. And when he grins, you can see long sharp fangs. And then whatever happens, happens.
You enter the hex. You experience that event. You dealt with it however you saw fit, and the next time you enter the hex, that guy's not there. One of the comments said that they did not like event based hex keys or they felt that it was not good design because, essentially, once you saw that one thing one time, as they said in their reply, no fun around there, no more. I think this is looking at a hex very simplistically. People will look at empty hexes like they might rooms in a dungeon. Four four walls, floor, and a ceiling, and it's just the absolute of emptiness. There's not even dust in there.
It's just nothing. Why empty rooms? Why would you do that? I think empty rooms have a place. I think empty hexes have a place. And I don't think that the reasoning for that is really much different between empty rooms and empty dungeons. But just like I would say about empty dungeon rooms, just because the dungeon room doesn't have something specific to interact with, it doesn't mean it's a void. That room was constructed for a purpose. Maybe that purpose is still evident. There might be remains of things.
They're not really interactable, interactive, but they're still there. There might be signs of things. There might just be a character to the room. And, of course, an empty room has a great purpose. Maybe you need to hide from something. Maybe you need to lay low in an empty room since nothing seems to be living in there and nothing seems to have been in there in a long time. That's a great candidate for somewhere you could duck inside, jam the door shut, and hope that nobody comes looking because, it's an empty room. Why go in? In a hex, the terrain's not empty.
You're not entering a void where it's just blackness and there's just nothing there at all. You've still got all kinds of train. You've got all kinds of landscape. And by the way, there could be stuff in the hex you just haven't discovered yet. And I say you as the party, but also you as the GM. Just because the party didn't stumble upon something in their first entry, right, that's what the hex key is. Oh, there was something in here that you noticed right away. Just because they didn't find something to notice right away doesn't mean that there's nothing in there to notice.
Maybe there's something that they decided to dig around and they could discover. That would be then fielding it back to you, the GM, to determine, well, what it is they discover. And, of course, the larger your hex, the more things that there should be to discover. And there should be many, many, many, many things to discover before the hex, say, runs dry of discoverability. But even then, there's always the chance that a new monster could move in, that someone could build something. We're usually playing in fantastic worlds, so who knows what kind of cataclysm something could rise up out of the ground, A chasm could open up into the ground. All kinds of fun stuff can happen. So no hex is really empty, like there's nothing in there.
It's just that nothing has been discovered yet. And when that yet comes to an end is entirely up to you as the GM. The first time the party goes through, they don't see anything. But then between sessions, you're putting stuff together, you're doing your prep, and you decide to put something in that hex. So now the next time the party goes through that hex, they take a different path, and suddenly they see something they didn't see before. Suddenly that hex that was empty is now filled with something. Like a dungeon room, an empty hex is also an invitation to maybe use it as a safe place. Well, there's nothing here.
We didn't find a lair. We didn't find some other weird thing. So maybe this is where we could set up camp before we get to the thing that we know is dangerous because there's all kinds of stuff going on over there. Empty hexes also help establish scale. If you have every hex has got a lot of stuff in it, things are gonna feel very crowded. It's gonna feel very dense. But if you want to really emphasize the openness, the width, and the breadth, then having empty hexes allows you to show that the vastness of this wood or the vastness of the prairie or the incredible spaciousness, I don't know, width of the desert. All these things that will take up a lot of hexes, but part of that is to show that not only are they just vast, but it's not filled with stuff.
You don't necessarily expect a desert to be filled with stuff. You expect a a desert to have locations very sparsely populated because it's a huge desert. And part of the thing that makes a desert dangerous is because there is so much nothingness. That's an empty hex. But empty is not blank. All empty means is just that there's something that hasn't been discovered yet. So you're in a hex. You've moved through this hex a couple of times.
Who's to say that there isn't a massive windstorm, Sirocco, and it uncovers a lion headed entry to some kind of underworld tomb. Who's to say? You as the GM. So your hexes are only as empty as long as you want them to be. As soon as you wanna fill them, fill them. That's all there is to it. But don't think because the hex has nothing in it right now that it somehow is a waste of space or it's useless. It's not. It shows some things about the vastness of your world.
It gives the party room to maneuver, potentially to rest, maybe to escape something that's chasing them without immediately running into something else. And it also gives you spaces on the canvas that are free for things to come up because you might be at some point looking at your hex map saying, something's happened. The necromancer has come. Where can I put the necromancer and his brooding forces that he's bringing with him from his nether kingdom? An empty hex is a great spot to point to and say, oh, that's where he may found his first tower. Well, if you filled all your hexes with stuff until they are bursting, you won't have any room to do that. So it leaves yourself some room. It leaves the party some room. It gives you some space to show the flavor of the world, the vastness of this wilderness, and it only has to stay empty.
And, again, empty meaning that there is not anything discovered in it as long as you want it to remain in that state. So don't look at an empty hex as some kind of waste of space. Look at it as an opportunity and use it as such. That's all I've got, everybody. Game on. Talk to you later. Bye now.
