Hex Crawls

[robertsconley]

So tell me I'm crazy! Settembrini is (un)clearly implying that there is some weird hard-wired connection in most people's minds between the presence of hexes on a map and a weird, disjointed-kind-of-movement in discrete-actions that produce it's own (unattractive to me) mini-game. A "hex crawl" is somehow different than moving across a continuous map with hexes on it for distance and scale.

I don't get a sense there is a general "hex crawl" form of play. Only an individual author idiocentric approach. For example I use hexes because their utility in measuring and as a handy reference location. But they are not a special gameplay elements for me. I could do what I do without hexes, it wouldn't be as easy to use the maps.

I have one of these in my dice box and have used it from time to time. But generally a hex grid is good enough.

 

[TerribleSorcery]

Yeah Squeen, what Conley said. He is in a position to know.

 

[EOTB]

I have no idea what Settembrini is attempting to say in that quote, in context to that adventure. But in no way does it make me question my prior play preferences

 

[squeen]

Rodger dodger.

 

[Osrnoob]

Peak J Essienburg

 

[The1True]

So tell me I'm crazy! Settembrini is (un)clearly implying that there is some weird hard-wired connection in most people's minds between the presence of hexes on a map and a weird, disjointed-kind-of-movement in discrete-actions that produce it's own (unattractive to me) mini-game. A "hex crawl" is somehow different than moving across a continuous map with hexes on it for distance and scale.

Hexes for me are a unit of exploration primarily and an abstract unit of movement secondly. Like "We slow down and search this new hex for areas of interest" or "We use the deer trail to move through this hex swiftly".

 

[TerribleSorcery]

Okay, let's see if for Squeen's edification I can do a quick 'example of play' here. This is a summary of some travelling in about half a session in my home game.
Random encounters and most of the actual hex contents are omitted. This is just the back-and-forth of travelling through my hexmap.
The players are moving through dense jungle and can travel 2 hexes per day.

Day 1
Me: What's the plan for this session?
Players: We want to look for those ancient burial mounds that the locals mentioned. We will head back to their camp and go on from there.
Me: Great. You head along the trail out of town [hex 0701, 0702] until you reach the cliffs [hex 0602]. Climbing down takes half the day, like usual. At the bottom, you enter the jungles. It is raining. I assume you are going your usual route. You reach the waterfall [hex 0703] by the time it gets dark. Everyone mark off a ration.

Day 2
Players: Let's follow the river to the goblin fort, then turn south.
[The group is navigating by familiar landmarks, since they are in dense jungle. Going along the river is quite handy.]
Me: Okay. You reach the goblin fort around midday. [Hex 0704] You don't see any patrols, and the rain makes it hard for the guards to spot you.
Players: Great, let's avoid these guys.
Me: You head south away from the river. [rolls for getting lost in the jungle away from landmarks, they are OK for now. Roll for discovery of hex contents, they found it!] Towards the end of the day, you come to an old Imperial watchtower built on low hill, crumbling and covered with vines. [hex 0604 - fight a giant locust, search the tower, find treasure and clues, etc]

Day 3
Players: Let's keep going this way to that old monolith we found before. From there, we'll turn east to find the wildmen.
[Because the group have been through these hexes a few times before, their chance to get lost is much lower when striking overland. Let nobody say I am without mercy.]
Me: Okay. Halfway through the day, you find the old monolith [hex 0505]. Turning east from there [rolls, another successful navigation check] you find the wildmen camp [hex 0506] at the end of the day. They are friendly since you helped them out last time. They offer you hospitality, so you don't need to mark off a ration today.
[Players hang out with the locals, blah blah]

Day 4
Players: Okay what did they say about these old mounds again?
Me: They point to the south and say they're about a day and some that way.
Players: Wicked, let's go.
Me: Okay, after a few hours you pass by the colourful stone towers you explored some time ago. [Hex 0405 - This is the extent of the group's exploration up until now. From here on, I roll regular chances to get lost] You travel on past them, progressing further south. The jungles here are a little less dense [hex 0306], but the terrain is still tough to get through and the rain shows no sign of slackening.

Day 5
Me: Continuing south. [They travel through hex 0206. They pass right by the burial mounds, which are in hex 0205. Oops!] You travel the jungle most of the day, and in late afternoon come across the crumbling remains of an old stone roadway, running east-to-west through the jungle. [hex 0106. Can't miss this as it runs across the whole hex]
Players: Okay, Leliana the witch is going to cast Wizard Mark on a piece of road so we can find this spot again. Now which way do we go? The wildmen didn't say anything about this. [debate debate] Let's keep going south, maybe it's further on.
Me: Okay, you travel a few hours more before nightfall [still in hex 0106]

Day 6
Me: Continuing south, the jungle is a bit less dense this way. The terrain is still rough and hilly, but the rain thins out some and you can see farther. [hex 0005 - Roll to get lost is easier. Hex contents are easy to see from anywhere in the hex anyway, no roll needed] After a few hours you spot a greenish-blue light in the sky like a spotlight on the clouds. It's ahead of you to the right.
Players: Weird! let's go towards it and check it out.
Me: Okay. You reach it around midday. A crumbling, ruined curtain wall surrounds a silver tower wrapped in a pillar of blue-green light. [describe the tower, the players go inside and immediately get scared]
Players: Fuck this! Let's get back to that crumbling roadway.
Me: Okay, you reach the road [hex 0106] by the end of the day.

Day 7
Players: [debate debate.] Let's follow the road west. Maybe we will reach the cliffs and get a sense of where we are.
Me: You guys follow the old roadway west. It isn't much easier to travel on this than through the jungle, it's so cracked and old. At least you can see a bit further. [no chance of getting lost. Pass through hex 0105]. In the late afternoon, as the roadway gradually ascends, the cliffs coalesce out of the mist and rain. The jungle thins out here [hex 0104] and gets more sickly-looking and dead the further you go. Finally, at the base of the cliffs, you come to a wide clearing, maybe 500 meters or so. Nothing grows here, and a low fog covers the ground. Up ahead is a great pit, and an earthen ramp leading to a cave entrance of some kind [Hex location 0104 - the road leads right to it].
Players: Oh boy...



Hexes are a tool that allows for placing locations and tracking player movements in a wilderness to a playable level of accuracy. This is Dungeons & Dragons, not Compasses & Cartographers. The group is 'inside the hex' in a general sense. I don't have to know exactly WHERE unless they are at a particular keyed location.
These locations are also a little bit 'floating around in the hex,' because players can pass through a hex several times, even travelling the same route in the same direction without finding one. Common sense must be applied here (you have that, right?). If the goblin fort is built beside the river, the players will automatically discover it travelling along the river. For the watchtower in the middle of an overgrown jungle, the players could (and did) travel through that hex many times before stumbling across it. An understanding of your terrain and sight distances are obviously vital here. This trip would have looked completely different if the PCs were marching through amber waves of grain.

Hexes allow for simplicity, ease of use and crucially, a low cognitive load on the DM.
They don't interfere at all with the players' sense of seamless exploration and travel.
There is no "mini-game."
There is no randomness - all these locations are either modules or my own creations, placed on the map long before the players got there.
You are objecting to problems that don't exist.

 

[The1True]

Hexes allow for simplicity, ease of use and crucially, a low cognitive load on the DM.
They don't interfere at all with the players' sense of seamless exploration and travel.
There is no "mini-game."

That looks super fun!
So your players are operating off a Hex Map as well as you?
It seems to me to at least some degree this is a gameable travel system and thus somewhat a 'minigame' or game within the game, no? So we're clear, I don't think this is a bad thing since it puts power in the players' hands to make informed choices.
But yeah, this really sums things up nicely!

 

[squeen]

First and foremost, thank TS for taking the time to spell that all out. It's nice an seemly and feels like it has a great immersive flow to it.

Common sense must be applied here (you have that, right?).

Err...no.

I still think that a telescoping effect is evident in your example (and EOTBs) that I don't really love. Let me just loosely enumerate them:

• chance of spotting something --- unless the fact that it's hidden is important, this seem unnecessarily simulation-ist and not a ton of fun
• every hex has a (random) chance of having something in it --- too dense. Does every 10x10' square in a dungeon have a chance?
• bullet blurbs of hex contents --- what makes something interesting (to me) is all the unexpected details that exists to be discovered (like layers of an onion)...and what makes it valuable is that there's something awesome "out there" that you have a real chance of walking past. This is not the case if it "floats" in a table (i.e. if you random-walk around enough you'll discover everything). I understand you CAN fully key a location, but most folks aren't doing that because of the enormous effort. This is of course tied to the notion (above) that every hex can have something interesting in it.

So what's the alternative?

The wilderness has a hex-map on it for distance, but it's not hex-ified. There is nothing special about moving from one hex to another. The contents on the map are predetermined with the exception of a table of random encounters (like in a dungeon, but possibly with the addition of some more elaborate "random locations" that are allowed to float until instantiated by party observation). Things are spaced out more and traveling through un-keyed wildness is hand-waived in the way one travels down a 10' wide corridor for 100-feet. Days of travel are the major unit of time, and they eat up resources. Roads, rivers, etc. are generally adhered-to because they are "safer" (usually) and faster (usually). Most points-of-interest naturally fall along by-ways because that's why roads are built, and outposts are along rivers because of their massive utility too.

Finding lost things is difficult and (usually) requires a guide, magic, or a lot of time searching near-by. In general, the lightly-keyed "naked" sites are pre-determined (sometimes years ago) but just in limbo because the DM hasn't gotten to them yet...and no one is going that direction (i.e. chance of exploration is low). But knowing them in advance gives you TONS of down-time to ponder them and sketch them out slowly in your mind...waiting for real inspiration to strike. Having fewer concrete ones (as oppose to dozens and dozens in a table) provides focus. In term of dynamism, the world "moves" between games and old sites that the players have visited (or not) get modified. Places and structures develop a history, and the "high ground" is valued and fought over.

Can everything I just said can be made to work on the hex-crawl map (and system) you describe above? Almost certainly! But to my calcified mind, I question if the hex-procedure is actually adding anything that's fun for DM or players? All it looks like to me is an algorithm for the DM that adds the illusion of detail without too much effort. What my mind balks at is that the detail seems (to me) to be just swirling mists of random chance. A parlor trick that offends my sensibilities of real substance in the invented world. Clearly, I'm out on a limb this, so as much as I appreciate your effort to show me how you've made it work (very well, thank you!)...I think my tastes just run differently. Note: I'm not claiming any "classic" play-style heritage here---just a preference. It just happens to be how my long-ago insomniac DM prepped. He had filing cabinets of cool stuff. We ached to discover it (...but barely scratched the surface in a decade of play)! There's a powerful romance to that just plain appeals to me.

If this helps explain anything about my mindset: As cool as the on-line game (based on the 1e DMG random tables) was --- Dungeon Robber felt hollow to me too. I was bored within minutes. Similarly, if I could sense that my DM was improvising all/most the content on-the-fly...it would be the same buzz-kill. The world-as-a-puzzle would vanish in a puff of logic.

 

[squeen]

@The1True : Planescape is Ren Fair for the super-exotic. While that can work, and is fun to flesh out, it generally has a shorter shelf-life...because where do you go from there? After the novelty wears off, you are back to a ho-hum existence without an outlet. Think about it in terms of a fantasy or sci-fi book: the first one that describes the unique setting is very innovative and cool...but the next 7 in the series seem like rehashed garbage. The virgin thrill fades fast. Gimmicky.

 

[The1True]

@The1True : Planescape is Ren Fair for the super-exotic. While that can work, and is fun to flesh out, it generally has a shorter shelf-life...because where do you go from there? After the novelty wears off, you are back to a ho-hum existence without an outlet. Think about it in terms of a fantasy or sci-fi book: the first one that describes the unique setting is very innovative and cool...but the next 7 in the series seem like rehashed garbage. The virgin thrill fades fast. Gimmicky.

We've gone 1-20 twice and 1-30 once with Planescape. There are literally infinite planes of reality to explore. There are numerous arguments against Planescape I'm willing to accept, including that it just does not appeal to the majority taste in elfgaming, but unless the DM is truly hopeless, it is completely impossible for the novelty to ware off in this setting. In fact, a solid argument against might be the non-stop barrage of novelty.

Spelljammer on the other hand wares off FAST. It's good for a mid-level story-arc but utter crap for a campaign.

Anyway, I hope I have made it quite clear that I understand and accept that Planescape hit a flat note with most D&D players. It's pretty Robert Lynn Asprin-style dork-fantasy and transparently marketed to (at the time) a just coming up, Gen X/Y crowd. I'll mock-protest when it gets slandered, but I'm not seriously here to change minds on this topic and conversely no one's going to sour me on the setting either

 

[The1True]

If this helps explain anything about my mindset:

I'm sorry man, I keep coming back to this map. I guess I just really love hexes. But don't you want to just clear each and every one of those? There's very obviously something waiting to be discovered in every hex. That's not keying every 10' of the dungeon. Just look at a rural map in of your area. There's stuff packed into every Mile, much less every 3/6/12 miles.

 

[TerribleSorcery]

That looks super fun!
So your players are operating off a Hex Map as well as you?

Not at all, that's my point. It's all done through narration.

Can everything I just said can be made to work on the hex-crawl map (and system) you describe above?

You are objecting to things I'm not doing, and then go on to tell me that the way to run the wilderness without hexes... is to do the things that I am doing!
I don't build the world out of the swirling mists of random chance.
I don't key adventure locations with a quick one-paragraph blurb. Believe me, I'd have a lot more free time if I did.
I do place locations on the map years in advance, according to my tastes - hexes don't have a random chance to be filled, I try to put something in every single hex.
I do spend time thinking about the world and its history and keep the world moving even when the players aren't looking.
I don't fucking improvise!
I am a high-prep DM to the point that I often miss sessions because it takes me so fucking long to write things up. As I cast my eyes over my stack of gaming notebooks and the pages of notes & spreadsheets I have on Google Drive, I can only laugh at being accused of minimally keying my campaign world.
What mental leap must you make to think that using a hexmap would change any of the above? We're still playing D&D. You might as well have said "I don't use hexes - instead, I'm a good DM" like the two statements are related.

Melan's example post that started this off - well, of course he had to keep things minimal. He created the beginning of a small campaign setting just for an example in a blog post! The Wilderlands, which is his inspiration, may be minimally keyed on a per-hex basis, but as it happens it's a much more gameable method of delivering information to the DM than the 2e Forgotten Realms boxed set I got for Christmas in 1994. You already know this. The fact that the DM still has to expand on the one-paragraph hex entries is no indictment at all.

If you don't like every hex having something in it - well, okay I guess. It is possible to pick the SIZE of hexes to adjust this, and that's what most people do. I go with 6 miles, but some folks go up to 24. And the equivalent of a hex is not a 10'x10' square in a dungeon - it's the dungeon room, and you well know that there is a random chance for each room to have something in it (DMG p. 171). Some dungeon rooms have big fights, some have traps, some have curiosities or window dressing. So it is with hexes.

 

[Malrex]

First and foremost, thank TS for taking the time to spell that all out. It's nice an seemly and feels like it has a great immersive flow to it.


Err...no.

I still think that a telescoping effect is evident in your example (and EOTBs) that I don't really love. Let me just loosely enumerate them:

• chance of spotting something --- unless the fact that it's hidden is important, this seem unnecessarily simulation-ist and not a ton of fun
• every hex has a (random) chance of having something in it --- too dense. Does every 10x10' square in a dungeon have a chance?
• bullet blurbs of hex contents --- what makes something interesting (to me) is all the unexpected details that exists to be discovered (like layers of an onion)...and what makes it valuable is that there's something awesome "out there" that you have a real chance of walking past. This is not the case if it "floats" in a table (i.e. if you random-walk around enough you'll discover everything). I understand you CAN fully key a location, but most folks aren't doing that because of the enormous effort. This is of course tied to the notion (above) that every hex can have something interesting in it.

So what's the alternative?

The wilderness has a hex-map on it for distance, but it's not hex-ified. There is nothing special about moving from one hex to another. The contents on the map are predetermined with the exception of a table of random encounters (like in a dungeon, but possibly with the addition of some more elaborate "random locations" that are allowed to float until instantiated by party observation). Things are spaced out more and traveling through un-keyed wildness is hand-waived in the way one travels down a 10' wide corridor for 100-feet. Days of travel are the major unit of time, and they eat up resources. Roads, rivers, etc. are generally adhered-to because they are "safer" (usually) and faster (usually). Most points-of-interest naturally fall along by-ways because that's why roads are built, and outposts are along rivers because of their massive utility too.

I'm with Squeen on this one.
I could easily just use squares instead of hexes for my wilderness maps--doesn't really matter to me. It's just to help measure distance/time. I guess I'm more of a point crawl guy--but the 'points' aren't connected and not automatically found (but they are all fleshed out).

I liked TS's post, but that is not my playstyle and neither of us are wrong. I could see TS's posted hexcrawl as being fun for a one or two off session or if it had an overarching goal. I still consider it D&D, but just never really explored that type of gameplay. If I were to play in TS's hexcrawl, as a player I would need more of a sense of purpose or goal instead of just for exploration or to 'map this section of wilderness'. It feels too 'zoomed out' for me and although finding things in the hex may be cool, it just seems there is a missed opportunity to add the gravy to the meat (i.e. rumors, adventure hooks--seems more like, explore and find a cool place and loot and move on). Without the gravy, this is where the areas may give off that 'random' feel for me.

I'd also walk back and forth in each hex until I found what was in that hex before moving on--like looking for my 'reward' for exploring--then I would want to explore the whole cave, dungeon, camp, tower, whatever before moving on. This is why I would need some sort of goal as to why I'm doing the hexcrawl in the first place or I wouldn't get very far on the hexmap. Like adventures that focus all on combat (open a door, fight a monster, get loot)--hexcrawls feels heavy on exploration and I prefer more of a balance of all aspects.

 

[squeen]

Fair enough. Hexes are room, and they are predetermined. Then my only objection if the uniformity and density of the spacial topology.

Seriously, I am not attacking your style. My written voice must be one of a major bastard, because I'm really speaking in the hypothetical and not being critical of your play. There's no he-uses-hexes = he-a-bad-DM equation in my mind. I just think the mechanics (and visuals) of hexes is droll. Peace brother!

Last point: When I design my wilderness AND dungeons, I find I am constantly wanting to push things further apart after I finish the key. Does that reoccurring theme happen to anyone else?

Far more interesting than "How do you personally make hex-crawls not suck?" is the notion of the World-as-a-Puzzle. I wasn't aware of my own feelings on this until I wrote it down as an explanation our what is off-putting to me about extreme procedural mise-a-mash. Even the point I made earlier, about how having a world-puzzle makes character death less relevant because you (as meta-player) retain what you have learned, was a aha moment that explains why I am not so much into character fetishization and rrrrroooolll-playing! How come no one ever wants to talk about those high-brow notions from my posts---instead I am type-cast as the disapproving father-figure!

I will now wander off, sit under a tree, and meditate on these topics of deep geek thinking. ;P

 

[EOTB]

I think a lot of it also maps back to how enthused someone is about the wargame element now mostly disused in D&D. If that is desired, active, and has in-game effects, then exploring the wilderness is a mix of exploration-as-indiana jones and also exploration-as-lewis-and-clark; i.e., pushing "here be dragons" farther away from you in all directions helps you to prepare and win the inevitable conflicts between units larger than either character or party.

Edit 1: You have to know where the mountain pass is before you can secure it, or use it to get troops around blocking terrain, or even to find out where the home caverns of the hobgoblins threatening the area are located. This knowledge is a form of treasure. It allows the player to meaningfully change the game world; also locating more traditional adventuring situations and opportunities on the side makes a practical process engaging for other types of players as well.

Perhaps not as much as a campaign specializing in "traditional adventuring" - but the broader form of play in the early days was wargamers adding on, not replacing.

Edit 2: perhaps another reason why hexcrawling is more attractive to me is because the raw data gained allows me the possibility of seeing something the DM (who will be controlling those large units) did not see during its generation - that I can exploit to the DM/hobgoblins surprise. Whereas a point crawl feels like discovering the DM's pre-conceived solutions/situations and allowing the DM to abstract everything else into a sort of stage prop scenery.

 

[TerribleSorcery]

... I could see TS's posted hexcrawl as being fun for a one or two off session or if it had an overarching goal. I still consider it D&D, but just never really explored that type of gameplay. If I were to play in TS's hexcrawl, as a player I would need more of a sense of purpose or goal instead of just for exploration or to 'map this section of wilderness'. It feels too 'zoomed out' for me and although finding things in the hex may be cool, it just seems there is a missed opportunity to add the gravy to the meat (i.e. rumors, adventure hooks--seems more like, explore and find a cool place and loot and move on). Without the gravy, this is where the areas may give off that 'random' feel for me...

What on earth makes you think that my campaign lacks a sense of purpose or goal, or rumours, or adventure hooks??

 

[squeen]

@TerribleSorcery (and everyone else)...how's about this tract: What does the hex-crawl add to your game that would otherwise be missing from a map without the hex-grid?

@EOTB : I like the idea that randomly generate terrain might allow you get the drop on the DM. That's an interesting notion! I would counter that even a hand-drawn map with a hex overlay might still allow for that kind of surprise. Certainly is happens to me (as the witless DM) in the (non-random) dungeons.

 

[Malrex]

What on earth makes you think that my campaign lacks a sense of purpose or goal, or rumours, or adventure hooks??

First of all, I want to make it clear that I'm not attacking your campaign. I'm honestly trying to figure out hexcrawls, I'm ignorant on that style of gameplay, and basing my opinion on your hexcrawl example above which was very helpful in providing a picture of what transpires. Actually quite thankful for your example.

I'm actually curious where do you add the rumors, hooks, etc.? Do you have the majority of them in the starting town--rumors about some of the places that are in the hex map (I'm assuming so)--but if that's the case, wouldn't the party be actively searching for those things that caught their interest? I guess when you said there was something in every hex, would the party necessarily know anything about these discoveries that they happened to stumble upon? Or is it something that's "random" (random as in not actively seeking it out but something you had thought about and placed there). For example, the silver tower on Day 6 of your example. They bailed quick...but were there rumors or hooks about that place or did they just stumble upon it? That is the basis of my opinion--because it seems to me they bailed because they weren't invested in it (i.e. they hadn't heard anything about it).

Obviously unfair to base an opinion on an example without playing in it, but that's what I seemed to have latched on too and mean no offense.

Edit 1: You have to know where the mountain pass is before you can secure it, or use it to get troops around blocking terrain, or even to find out where the home caverns of the hobgoblins threatening the area are located. This knowledge is a form of treasure. It allows the player to meaningfully change the game world; also locating more traditional adventuring situations and opportunities on the side makes a practical process engaging for other types of players as well.

Perhaps not as much as a campaign specializing in "traditional adventuring" - but the broader form of play in the early days was wargamers adding on, not replacing.

Edit 2: perhaps another reason why hexcrawling is more attractive to me is because the raw data gained allows me the possibility of seeing something the DM (who will be controlling those large units) did not see during its generation - that I can exploit to the DM/hobgoblins surprise. Whereas a point crawl feels like discovering the DM's pre-conceived solutions/situations and allowing the DM to abstract everything else into a sort of stage prop scenery.

The knowledge as a form of treasure is something I could get behind. And NOT saying people don't do that with their hexcrawls, but I have it in my head that it's just exploration based. "Find the two villages and form a treaty between them" or EOTB's example, or something to that effect would probably make me like the idea of hexcrawls better--and maybe that's how they are lined up--I'm not an expert on it. But just uncovering the 'fog of war' just wouldn't jive with my playstyle. I would also explore everything...would probably be level 5 by Hex 5.

As for the point crawls, I think its based on player creativity and the DM. Players could do things the DM didn't pre-conceive and do that sort of thing all the time. I actually enjoy it when they do as DM.

 

[The1True]

The Wilderlands, which is his inspiration, may be minimally keyed on a per-hex basis, but as it happens it's a much more gameable method of delivering information to the DM than the 2e Forgotten Realms boxed set I got for Christmas in 1994.

This! I remember being SO frustrated with the lack of detail in both the Forgotten Realms and Greyhawk worlds. But that stupid plastic distance overlay in the FR box was the final straw.

If you don't like every hex having something in it - well, okay I guess. It is possible to pick the SIZE of hexes to adjust this, and that's what most people do. I go with 6 miles, but some folks go up to 24. And the equivalent of a hex is not a 10'x10' square in a dungeon - it's the dungeon room, and you well know that there is a random chance for each room to have something in it (DMG p. 171). Some dungeon rooms have big fights, some have traps, some have curiosities or window dressing. So it is with hexes.

Preach brother!

The knowledge as a form of treasure is something I could get behind.

I've been thinking about this for a while now. The hex crawls I've been working on, I've been building indexes of Items, NPC's and Locations with the aim towards assembling lists that could be added to the treasure tables so that a possible component of any given treasure hoard might be Information leading to further adventure. The indexes would need to be coded in a way that level or campaign-appropriate hooks/rumours/clues could be deliberately chosen by the DM/designer. The idea being that exploration should lead to still more exploration.