Hexplore: Borderlands

Courtney Campbell
Self Published
OSR

Discover the hidden wilderness game in Dungeons and Dragons! It will bring the actual experience of discovery to your players faces. They will be excited to explore a strange fantasy world!

This eighteen page hex toolkit is something new under the sun. Maybe? I bought it expecting something like Wilderlands. I got something ELSE hex related: a domain play product. Those things are rare as fuck, henc this review of a non-adventure

Pre-1e D&D is a masterpiece of design. You can see how it evolved. Ear worms for people listening at doors. ESP to stop those fucking prisoners from betraying you. Resource play. The spell ist, in particular, doctates the play style. (along with gold=xp.) High level adventures don’t typically work because they are not SUPPOSED to work. By the time you’re high level you should be moving on to other things … doman play.

The first page of the product does a great job explaining its role in the world. Early D&D had a high-level play style where you went in to a hex, with your retainers, men-at-arms, etc, and cleared it of creatures. You set up some points of lights, got some settlers, and taxed the fuckers. TaDa! High level play.

This thing supports that play style. It’s a one-hex overview. That one hex is broken down in to some nini-hexes with features in them. There’s a couple of medium adventuring locations, a demi-human tribe, three lairs, four landmarks,, rumors, and a wandering monster table. Everything has a kind of relation to the description style from Wilderlands. This landmark is the house of an albino woodsman with mongolisn and is a superior warrior. This one is an abandoned herb garden, or a ruined tower, or a talking bird. The lairs are a sunken ship, hill caves and a basalt obelisk. The medium sites are a towerful of bards, a bandit camp, and a volcano with a lost world inside. All have nice little pictures meant to be inspiring. The Medium sites have some floorplans with a true minimal key. “9. Thone. Table.” or “12. Bodies on floor. 2d12 zombies.” The lairs just have a big “notes” section for you to jot things down on.

Nothing here is really put together, or interrelated. That’s all up to the DM. There may be a sentence or two of description of the general area/lair/etc description, but then it’s just he minimal key and picture to inspire you to create something. Sit down for an hour, think, jot notes, and have a big hex for people to clear … up to and including ye old 110 bandits.

It’s an interesting concept. There’s no scale to the maps, so I assume it standard hex sizes. Would it kill ya to put that on the map Courtney? Anyway, I’m not sure how to evaluate it. It’s trying to be useful to a style of play doesn’t really have many supplements for it, so its hard for me to judge … and I LUV judging things. It’s a toolkit, not an adventure. It’s a toolkit for something that I don’t think has any other examples. If you take Wilderlands as your guide, then this supports the DM well. You, the DM, will need to flesh this out just as you would a Wilderlands hex. Riff on thing much more than a standard adventure.

This is $4 at DriveThru.https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/247916/Hexplore-Borderlands?affiliate_id=1892600