Wilderness adventures

[bryce0lynch]

I've never run a wilderness adventure that was simply "here is the wilderness, go nuts".

I think your "goal crawl" is the conventional wisdom? The "go nuts" style was a misunderstanding of what a hexcrawl is?

I wonder, are there historical resources/blog/form entries that describe how hexcrawling was approached by the players and DM? Maybe something to ask Conley about? Anyone else come to mind? And there's the guy running the spaceship game on Carcosa? That seems crawly. I wonder what his initial play was?

Further, is "go nuts" a viable play style and under what assumptions? Carve out a kingdom? Personal goals/xp?

Hmmm, is it viable to say that the goalcrawl is a more modern convention, based on a "goal" and that "go nuts" [and some other style style?] is related to the more boardgamey "win" condition of the gold=xp dungeoncrawl?

 

[DangerousPuhson]

Further, is "go nuts" a viable play style and under what assumptions? Carve out a kingdom? Personal goals/xp?

Personal goals arising from improvised scenarios tend to float to the surface more in these situations (I ran a game like this for about a year before migrating the group over to my usual sandbox). Unfortunately, if your players aren't especially creative/invested, then the game grinds to a screeching halt until the DM is forced to lead the party by the nose into something exciting.

I know the OSR thinks that railroading = literally Hitler, but it is a necessary evil in freeform "goalcrawl" games.

 

[Two orcs]

I think the "go nuts" style emerges naturally when you're used to running dungeons which you can explore in a haphazard way and still have fun.

 

[Yora]

I think your "goal crawl" is the conventional wisdom? The "go nuts" style was a misunderstanding of what a hexcrawl is?

I've always been assuming so myself. But there are a couple of very extensive guides out there that go into great detail about how to construct a hexcrawl sandbox and the procedures to navigate it, and I don't recall anyone ever even mentioning player goals.
If you want to teach people hexcrawling, I think that would probably one of the most critical things to explain right at the start.

 

[bryce0lynch]

A misunderstanding of the sandbox, where the players wander freely of their own accord. An abrogation of the DM's responsibilities to kickstart the game and keep it flowing. Thus it may be that "here's some hexcrawl hooks" (well, more than that) and "here's some techniques when things slow, etc" are more important in the hexcrawl and topics that are not generally covered?

 

[The1True]

Hexcrawls seem to be mostly empty maps with perhaps every tenth hex you move to having something in it.

So design a crawl where every hex has something in it. It's labour intensive, but worth it. Even (as Slick mentioned) at the 1 Mile scale there should be locations of note. Trollsmyth pointed out that a map of medieval Sherwood Forest was relatively tiny compared to the average D&D hex map and contained a ton of explorable features. We don't need to make these vast, empty wildernesses. Conversely, not every hex needs to be the Temple of Awesome Evil; even just curious natural features are worth noting as important reference points to traveling PC's and worth investigating even if they lead to nothing (for now). But yeah, I recommend slapping a 1 Mile grid down on your favourite, familiar rural area some time (like what Two orcs is saying there) and looking at all the things jammed into that space. You might be surprised!

 

[The1True]

Also, I've got another section on here where I'm trying to collect hexcrawl resources as research for forming a coherent theory/use behind them

Are we encouraged to add to these lists or are they curated?

 

[The1True]

Thus it may be that "here's some hexcrawl hooks" (well, more than that) and "here's some techniques when things slow, etc" are more important in the hexcrawl and topics that are not generally covered?

And this bores down to the three most fundamental questions I've been wanting to ask:
How much can the simplified/streamlined travel/exploration meta-game diverge from the chosen rules set before the reader starts to feel that you're trying to fob your own homebrew on them?
How many paragraphs/pages would be acceptable in a published product for explaining this procedure? (Given a fully detailed hex-crawl would be more on the long side of things).
How many paragraphs/pages would be acceptable for coaching the DM in how to show the players that they are free to chase objectives or dally with minutia and how to exploit the game within the game for fun and profit? sub-question: Could this be integrated into the starting pages of the product or should it remain separate and easily referenced?

 

[Yora]

So design a crawl where every hex has something in it. It's labour intensive, but worth it. Even (as Slick mentioned) at the 1 Mile scale there should be locations of note. Trollsmyth pointed out that a map of medieval Sherwood Forest was relatively tiny compared to the average D&D hex map and contained a ton of explorable features. We don't need to make these vast, empty wildernesses.

Sure, you can do that.
But my own imagination of what wilderness should be like is very different. Which is why I think hexcrawls are probably not for me.

My mental image is more like Lewis and Clark or searching the source of the nile. It appears to me that hexcrawls are meant for much more localized campaigns.

 

[bryce0lynch]

Are we encouraged to add to these lists or are they curated?

Both. I'll update the site information/rules.

I'm collecting resources and there's no reason why others can't post things there also. Either with concepts, drivel, or pointers to other things. I will occasionally curate the threads, collecting resources and opinions. My endgame is the formation of a cohesive gameplay guide, both in mechanics and philosophy, for the hexcrawl. (Or adventure theory, or how D&D works, or my MA/GW megadungeon, or the mythology of monsters. IE: witch adventures with the threefold girl/mother/crone model.)

 

[The1True]

Yeah sorry Yora, I see six-sided things when I close my eyes at night It sounds like you're looking for a path crawl. Draw your vast, unexplored wilderness like a dungeon where there are a few legitimate routes (and maybe one or two dead ends) on the way to your fabled inland sea or mythic wellspring of the mother river or pass through the mighty mountains. Populate it with encounters and side-treks. Express the lengths of the paths in travel times right on the map rather than distances. And, lay down some loose guidelines for when your PC's inevitably decide to bushwhack cross-country. I would totally be down to play that scenario!

 

[DangerousPuhson]

And this bores down to the three most fundamental questions I've been wanting to ask:
How much can the simplified/streamlined travel/exploration meta-game diverge from the chosen rules set before the reader starts to feel that you're trying to fob your own homebrew on them?
How many paragraphs/pages would be acceptable in a published product for explaining this procedure? (Given a fully detailed hex-crawl would be more on the long side of things).

If you can fit it on a single reference page, I'd say that's probably your max goal. Just as a general best practice. Any more than a page is overkill and overcomplicating what shouldn't be a complicated procedure.

How many paragraphs/pages would be acceptable for coaching the DM in how to show the players that they are free to chase objectives or dally with minutia and how to exploit the game within the game for fun and profit? sub-question: Could this be integrated into the starting pages of the product or should it remain separate and easily referenced?

As many as you want, really. Your question would be better stated as "how many pages about this can I write before the reader just checks out entirely and doesn't want to bother with it?", in which case I'd argue that it, along with all homebrew rulings for specific adventures, should be as absolutely concise as is humanly possible to make it.

To your sub-question: if it's just general coaching advice, it doesn't need to be put onto a reference sheet. It gets read once, digested, and then the adventure proper can be started. I'd personally keep it near the start of the document, since it'll have to be one of the first thing the user reads in order to run the adventure.

 

[Yora]

I have been looking into pathcrawls and had been fiddling around with procedures for them for a while, but I found that one thing they don't seem to be able to do is parties getting lost. And I think for long journeys into the wilderness, that's actually a pretty important element.

What I am considering now is some kind of hybrid system. You start with a map that has winding roads, paths, rivers, and coastlines and shows the outlines of mountains, swamps, deserts, forests, and so on. Your generic 21st century mainstream RPG map, basically. Then you overlay a hex grid on the whole thing for the GM map. (The players never get to see any hexes.)
When the players follow a road or river, which I think will be most of the time, you simple count the hexes their path is passing trough to track their progress.
However, sometimes the players might look at their map and decide to simply head straight south through unmapped territory until they reach a big river and then follow the river west to their destination. Or they are travelling through some hills along a path and see an ominous fortress somewhere in the swamp below, and decide they want to try to reach with no marked path through the swamp. I think then you really will need hexes to track where they are actually going while they are moving essentially blind.

What I think I don't want, though it is certainly an option, is the players blindly heading into the forest and running into a cave or something. At the scale of a large wilderness, with visibility being maybe 20 or 30 meters at the most, the chance of finding something that is not on a path you are travelling on seem almost impossibly miniscule. The idea of saying "there is one site that you will run into if you pass through this 80 square kilometer area" just isn't compatible with my brain.
Obviously things are quite different when you're travelling through treeless plains (but even then a 6-mile hex is massive), but for my own use I keep approaching things from the perspective of dense forests.

 

[DangerousPuhson]

What I think I don't want, though it is certainly an option, is the players blindly heading into the forest and running into a cave or something. At the scale of a large wilderness, with visibility being maybe 20 or 30 meters at the most, the chance of finding something that is not on a path you are travelling on seem almost impossibly miniscule. The idea of saying "there is one site that you will run into if you pass through this 80 square kilometer area" just isn't compatible with my brain.

For stuff like that, I'd probably keep a list of "floating" (possibly generic) sites, almost like a random encounter table but with sites instead of monsters. Then note on the map whenever the players encounter one in their trackless wanderings for later reference. It would look like this:

-Players decide to go south off-road across some grasslands
-I roll on my "Random Grassland Sites" table and get something like "Barbarian Encampment"
-I note on the map that there is a "Barbarian Encampment" in the hex
-I run the player's encounter at the encampment until they're ready to move on
-I decide if I want to make the Encampment relevant to the rest of the adventure at all
-If yes, then I adjust the game world accordingly (the Barbarians sack a nearby village or I add "Barbarians" to my random encounter tables or whatever)
-Repeat as needed

Obviously sometimes a grassland is just empty grass for miles, in which case this is solved with either a decent size chunk of my Random Sites Table being occupied by "nothing" entries, or I roll percentile for each few miles of travel to determine if there's a random site, or what have you.

Y'all are honestly kind of overcomplicating this process more than it needs to be IMO. Your players are only going to give a shit about what they encounter in-game, not all the mechanics behind it; go with whatever is easiest to personally use.

 

[Slick]

(The players never get to see any hexes.)The idea of saying "there is one site that you will run into if you pass through this 80 square kilometer area" just isn't compatible with my brain.

That's why there are multiple scales of hex maps. Once the players enter a large forest I would just switch over to a smaller sized hex map, or even a pointcrawl, until they make their way out of it again. Regarding visibility and finding caves/important places: Let them move at an "exploratory pace" where they have a greater chance of finding something but move at a fraction of normal speed through each hex (with perhaps an increased chance of getting lost?). Seems a bit boring though unless it all happens in a very short period of IRL time.

I'm not sure how common a party just wandering blind into a forest is, though. In my experience they are typically following some kind of path, or navigating through clearings with plenty of visibility and landmarks. Delving head first into a dense forest with no prominent features to orient yourself by is a very stupid thing to do, akin to wandering around a dungeon without a light source, and should be handled as such.

 

[The1True]

Y'all are honestly kind of overcomplicating this process more than it needs to be

Fair enough. I guess my twisted interpretation of the initial question of this thread was how do I make a wilderness adventure with mass appeal. There are plenty of solutions using procedural generation, but then the adventure becomes a DIY project without the common story threads that everyone traveling through a published dungeon adventure are going to experience. I'm talking about the wilderness itself being the central theme, the goal being to cross or explore it. It's not just a semi-inconvenient thing between Point A and Point B in this case. A few gameable rules let the players know that the wilderness itself is/can be the game.

 

[Yora]

That was kind of the original question. Travel procedures are certainly important, but not the whole story. The discussion about procedures here has been highly fruitful, I would say, but on the player side, the really interesting stuff probably is going to be the actual content they encounter, and by a good margin.

One thing that feels relevant to me, though that might just be my own peculiar preferences of how adventures should be, is that the players have personal reason and motivations to go exploring a site they come across instead of going around them and being on their way, and not just simply do it because they feel they are supposed to because the GM put it there.
I don't know remember where, but when I first got interested in B/X and AD&D, I read something about one early designer always putting little side areas with very valuable treasures and very high protection into dungeons. These aren't supposed to be beatable or survivable by parties that should be able to make decent progress on that dungeon level, and it would be smart of them not to push there. But if they feel they are being clever and enjoy the excitement of extreme danger, they are free to try it. This is the main thing that caused my fascination with sandboxes. The players taking risk because they want it, not because they feel obliged to at least try out something the GM created for them.
Not quite sure how that could translate to wilderness travel adventurs, though.

Some years ago I made the observation that the setting with perhaps the best potential for a wilderness sandbox is, funnily enough, Dark Sun. In Dark Sun, you have this wonderful contrast between the cities and the desert. When the party is in a city, they have access to food and water, but as PCs they will inevitably get the attention of the templars sooner or later. Eventually they will have too flee the city and escape out into the desert. In the desert they no longer have to worry about templars, but their supplies and resources will be getting drained pretty fast. Signs of the possible presence of water can be great motivators to explore dangerous looking caves and ruins. But eventually, the supply situation will get so bad that they will have to go to a city. Another city full of templars who will make their stay rather unpleasant.
Dark Sun has this amazing inbuild potential for an endless cycle of pushs and pulls that forces the party to constantly be on the move and permanently being either chased or hunting for supplies. Putting your butt down and waiting for an opportunity that sounds profitable and fun isn't an option. The world itself requires that they have to keep moving and scavange for supplies all the time.
Certainly not a model that is a fit for all possible wilderness setting, but I think this is a really cool example of what a really well done wilderness sandbox could look like.

 

[The1True]

the best potential for a wilderness sandbox is, funnily enough, Dark Sun.

I was thinking of that earlier! I just played through a Dark Sun campaign, and I remember one of the best parts being that we'd have these campaign objectives lying in far off places and the DM would lay the map down for us and we could navigate ourselves. Sail over the Silt Sea? Take the long way across the plains? We could see major landmarks and rumoured features and route ourselves through them to do a little investigating along the way. I guess there was the added benefit of flat wasteland that allowed us to spot interesting unmarked sites as we traveled (plus the diminished hassle of getting lost). But yeah; letting the players interact with the map

 

[Chomy]

Some thoughts here, far from being a theory. I may also just repeat a few notions you guys have already thrown in, sry bout that.

1. "The minigame sucks" problem: the issue I've encountered most often as a player is that some DMs do not try to make the wilderness *adventure* interesting, but *travel* itself. Instead of creating adventures, they create procedures that would, through simulation, "generate" adventure. It sounds like a great plan, but most of the time they've failed, as the result boiled down to all the hardships of travel (losing food, water, getting tired & fcked by all kinds natural disasters and bad weather), lots of semirealistic and tiresome details, and obligatory no-decisions (yes, we are trying to find fresh water and food each day and yes, we do stand guard during the night). Which is boring in my opinion. I mean, resource management is important, and it adds to the fun, but it is not the fun itself.

At best they use random encounters, which, when done creatively, can really make memorable adventures. But that might be another topic.

2. Lack of real decisions: another issue is that on large-scale hexmaps usually there are not enough decision points to make travelling really exciting in itself, and those we have get tired easily. Do I want to leave the safety of the road and cross that mountain or forest hex, just to reach the city/dungeon a few days sooner? It is a valid choice, it's just not really an exciting one. Now, if I have some more information about what dangers and rewards await me in those mountains or forests, the decision gets more interesting. Names can also help. "Green forest" means boredom. It is not appealing at all. "Forest of the Iron Wights" is something i might want to see just to find out whatever the f* is an "iron wight".

Also, if it is not a "hexcrawl for hexcrawling" campaign, the party is usually travelling somewhere. They have a target. If they really want to get there, they won't stray. So, if you want to make a "wilderness adventure" out of it, your options as a DM are mostly limited to roadblocks and train stops. The party has to stumble upon something really interesting/motivating to abandon their goal. I think it is easiest achieved by getting them really curious about something, or hinting at great rewards at the cost of great risks. (I might be wrong of course.)

I mean:
- A caravan massacred by something that left goblin footprints are... most probably goblins -> whatever guys, i've had enough of them gobbos, let's go on
- A caravan attacked by intelligent velociraptors that used sleep gas grenades, left everyone alive and only abducted one of the passangers... you know you'd be curious wtf is going on.

Disclaimer: pure hexcrawl campaigns never really worked for me. I had to motivate players to travel. (Just as pure dungeon crawls never worked for me. My players like it, but I have to motivate them to explore those dungeons.) So there may be something in hexcrawl procedures I don't get.

3. "Exploration is not fun. Discovery is fun." <-- exactly this. Just as Yora said. Most of the time what makes wilderness adventures exciting is what the party discovers. It is also the easiest to plan ahead. It should be surprising or at least non-trivial. It should be possible (and rewarding in some way) to interact with. Best if it is something open-ended that supports multiple approaches. Discoveries with the sole purpose of creating atmosphere, foreshadowing or hinting at something are of course okay, just not as exciting as actual interaction.

"Hexcrawls seem to be mostly empty maps with perhaps every tenth hex you move to having something in it." <-- and also this. Maybe it's just that I've read and ran the wrong hexcrawls, but most of the time what the party discovers is a standalone encounter or mini-location (maybe, but not necessarily because distances between locales are too big to be linked somehow). Which is shallow, even if the discoveries are interesting.

Examples:
- Hex 1234: a pair of griffons with golden feathers guarding a golden egg. 50% that one of them is away.
- Hex 2345: a tribe of 137 goblins worshipping Growlog petrified "statue" of a laughing hill giant (Tasha's hideous laughter + flesh to stone hit the dude the same time). The goblins all laugh like maniacs in a fight.
- Hex 3456: tower of the wizard Clorox, alchemist and archmaster of transmutation magic. Needs troll poop in great quantities for his latest experiments.

What I miss from these kind of adventure locales/encounters is a short description or hint of how they relate to each other. Like:
- The golden feathered griffons are Clorox's creations. He loves them and would be furious to see them slain.
- Clorox petrified the giant. Thinking of the foolish goblins idolizing his victim humors him greatly.
- The goblin shaman stated that Growlog demands sacrifice - the golden egg of the griffons. The goblins have tried but could not get it. The party would earn their respect if they presented the egg to the tribe.

These kind of relations help the DM create complicatons and consequences. Depending on the approach of the party, it could lead to multiple outcomes. The party will enjoy that they have agency, reason to interact, leads to follow and consequences to their actions, and it will also be exciting for the DM to see where the adventure goes.

Now, if someone really wants to add complexity to their wilderness locales, they'll usually add
- a dungeon(ish locale), which will make that session more like a dungeon adventure
- a settlement or habitat, which will make the session more like a social adventure

Which is totally okay. Required, even. It's just that they are not really "wilderness adventures" anymore. If you want to stay aboveground and outside city walls, and create all kinds of intertwining relations between nearby places and creatures you'll probably get down to smaller scale (like a pointcrawl). And with that, the adventure will be structured much like a dungeon.

TL;DR version of what I think is important when designing a wilderness adventure:
- Do not waste too much time on resource management, especially on routine tasks, it's boring.
- Give a reason for the players to explore. Not to go somewhere, but to search for something. Or create the need to visit multiple locations in whatever order they wish to go. Create relations between the places and creatures living in the area. Give the creatures some habits that the players can learn and use to their advantage. Create conflicts and factions. Make discoveries non-trivial and interesting to fiddle with. Basically, do what you would do with a dungeon.
- Give the players interesting decision points, and provide information to help them decide. Throw in gossip. Make some stuff visible or audible from a distance, like (just as Two Orcs proposed) landmarks. Something twinkling on the peak of that mountain, a really unusual tower in the distance, red smoke rising from the forest, the sound of drums or screams in the distance, or simply a signpost telling travellers no to go right (especially if you want them to go right ).

Like I said, I find the latter two a bit harder on large scale hexcrawls, but it sounds nowhere near impossible.

...annnd that is my 2 cents.

 

[Yora]

Do I want to leave the safety of the road and cross that mountain or forest hex, just to reach the city/dungeon a few days sooner? It is a valid choice, it's just not really an exciting one. Now, if I have some more information about what dangers and rewards await me in those mountains or forests, the decision gets more interesting. Names can also help. "Green forest" means boredom. It is not appealing at all. "Forest of the Iron Wights" is something i might want to see just to find out whatever the f* is an "iron wight".

That's a good point that makes me think I need to reconsider my approach of "you can see only 20-30 meters ahead in the forest". That's no basis to make long term navigation decisions. Having the occasional half-ruined lookout tower or prominent rocky hilltop as a location on the pointcrawl map to let players get some vague impressions what environment the different paths will lead to should be a start.