Hexed Wasteland

and November production update

Exploration in TTRPGs can be defined as venturing into the Unknown so as to make it Known, progressing the story in the process.

Exploration in TTRPGs is hard.

In this issue of Ink & Dice, I’ll talk a bit about Exploration, and I’ll present to you a playable mechanism that might make your next Exploration session a bit easier (and maybe even more fun). I’ve also got the November Production update to share, as well as some Kickstarter news.

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Inside

• Exploration

• Kickstarter Updates

• November Production Update

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Exploration

While Exploration is supposed to be one of the 3 pillars of Dungeons & Dragons (along with Combat and Social Interaction), D&D—5th edition in particular—is frequently maligned for its treatment of this facet of the game.

Exploration is hard to simulate in a TTRPG because at one end of the spectrum the player has a map that is already completely filled in and at the other end the map starts out blank and is randomly generated as the game is played. The former greatly diminishes the unknown part of the Unknown. The latter turns exploration into a “logistics simulator.” (Quote from

Beau Rancourt

’s absolutely incredible breakdown of the overland travel rules of various TTRPGs.)

In my experience, neither of these approaches ends up being very fun at the table, which is a shame, because Exploration is the part of TTRPGs that I enjoy the most: discovering the Unknown in a strange world full of strange things to see and strange people to meet.

But what if there was another way? What if we had a mechanism that could produce semi-random outputs with a memory for previous outputs? What if it had built-in features to mimic wandering, getting lost, or experiencing a setback?

The Hexflower

The mechanism that I am talking about is the hexflower, or the hex flower game engine, as Goblin’s Henchman, author of the Hex Flower Cookbook, calls it (you can read about their experience with this mechanism here).

Below is an example of a hexflower. If you were to be going on an overland journey through unexplored territory in your TTRPG, you would assign each hex with a terrain type. The terrains could be organized in such a fashion that they made sense geographically. Then, on each turn of travel, you would roll on the movement key and move your token from one hex to another. The terrain shown in the new hex tells you the terrain your characters are moving through during that turn.

The trick here is to remember that the hexflower is not a map. It is only an engine that spits out terrain types based on the last terrain type used. It does not need to have distances attached to it. Each hex is only an indicator of terrain for a period of time.

Sometimes (as in the example above) you can plant special hexes on the hexflower that indicate a particular location or event (such as reaching a destination), but the spatial relationship between the special hex and the starting hex has no connection to the in-world distance between those two places.

How does this improve our Exploration experience?

1. No longer do you need to remember your trigonometry classes when figuring out how far on the map you can move when the hexes are 6 miles across (edge-to-edge? corner-to-corner?) and you are traveling 8 miles in a day. At the start of each turn (which can be a watch, a day, a week, or anything else that fits your system/story), roll on the hexflower and adjust the terrain for that turn.

2. No longer will you immediately know the optimal route between two places on the map. The movement of the token on the hexflower is randomized by the dice. You might be able to see the places you could end up if you have seeded the hexes with special locations, but the journey to find those places is left up to the dice, keeping the Exploration fresh and interesting throughout the game.

3. No longer do you need complicated tables of probabilities to simulate getting lost or wandering across the map. If you have a destination hex on the hexflower, some trips will take more turns than others to reach that destination. In effect, you are always lost, until you get there.

4. Now, terrain-specific random events can be (re)introduced. Add in a table of random events/encounters for each type of terrain. Each turn, once you roll for your terrain, roll for an event or encounter in the terrain you are entering for that turn.

You also have the option to change the weight given to different movement directions. In the example above, with the Start at the bottom and the End at the top, I used a movement key with a heavy preference for movement up the hexflower (only a 6/36 chance of moving down, down-left, or down-right and a 16/36 chance of moving straight up). If you wanted a longer journey, or if you were using the hexflower to generate a different aspect of your game, you could rebalance this distribution, even going all the way to a 1d6 roll with even odds of moving in any direction.

For more details on the flexibility offered by hexflower engines, I highly recommend reading Goblin’s Henchman’s writing on the subject, linked above.

Another Problem Arises

The hexflower is not necessarily the solution to every problem with Exploration in TTRPGs, however. The biggest issue with this type of Exploration is this: what do you do when you want to turn around and go back to the place that you started? Do you repeat the terrain generation procedure on the hexflower? Do you have to write down the terrains you passed through and then go backwards through them?

I would recommend three possible solutions to this issue:

1. No going back: use the hexflower terrain generator only when the characters are going on a one-way journey. You could even use it repeatedly, creating each leg of a journey with multiple stops along the way.

2. Weird world: you’ll notice that the title attached to the hexflower above is “Hexed Wasteland.” This hexflower will feature in an upcoming ECO MOFOS!! jam entry, and the word Hexed here is a double entendre: (1) the wasteland has been divided into hexes, and (2) it is cursed. In that module, any journey will use the hexflower, regardless of whether or not you have made that journey before, because the land is strange and magical and cannot be trusted to maintain the spatial relationships between locations.

3. Map it out: the last option would be to fill in the hexes of an actual hex map during the course of play. Each turn, the PCs would state which direction on the hex map they are moving, and then a roll on the hexflower would populate that hex with terrain. The map generated during this process would then be available for use later in the game, as the Unknown has become Known. The biggest caveat here is that you potentially lose the benefit of logical geography that the hexflower offers, as the characters could loop back on themselves and end up putting a mountain in the middle of a giant swamp. Personally, I don’t think that matters too much. It’s a strange world out there; don’t let a lonely mountain stop you from having fun.

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Kickstarter Updates

The Endling Kickstarter landing page is up! This solo-journaling game uses a hexflower much like the ones described above to generate the journey that the endling takes during the game. Follow along to be notified when the campaign goes live, which will probably be in about 2 weeks.

I have also written one of the intro adventures for a new sci-fi shooter TTRPG called Dirtbags. It’s a fast-paced game of running and gunning action, and my adventure, Incursion on Synteck Station, sees your crew of dirtbags breaking into a space station to figure out why the research team there cut off communications with their corporate headquarters. Check out the Kickstarter landing page here, and follow along to be notified when it goes live!

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November Production Update

Here’s the updated Production Schedule for my Work In Progress games. Newly revealed is Incursion on Synteck Station, part of the Dirtbags! Kickstarter. I also adapted my Liminal Horror module On The Hill to The Lost Bay RPG, renaming it The Will of the Forest. The module now follows the Lost Bay Urban Legend framework instead of the Liminal Horror Voidcrawl framework, and there were enough changes to merit a rename and a new cover.

Endling is the big focus for the rest of the month, but I also added a new line for Deepest Circle. I’m still working out details for this one, but I am planning for it to be a 1-player campaign to accompany my Captain & Crew Pirate Borg solo rules. I’ll have more details to share soon!

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Thank you!

Thanks for sticking with me all the way to the end. I hope you enjoyed this issue of Ink & Dice, and I’ll be back in a couple weeks to announce the launch of the Endling Kickstarter!

—MAH