how we did it

hello everybody. i did a gmless hexcrawl last month with ocean, it took me a while to get this post published because it didn’t schedule correctly. this is part of some larger ideas i’ve been working on and looking to explore with games because i think it’s interesting. we used the wilderness hexplore generator, along with luke gearing’s wolves upon the coast. partway through, we also started using chris mcdowall’s ‘into the land’ spark tables to create more interest in otherwise empty hexes.

we rolled up characters and mine was harlaw, the bloody. he had pretty shitty stats and could barely speak anglish, so i decided he must be a sheltered anaemic teenager. ocean’s comparatively capable denin took on the role of my guardian, eventually becoming a shepherd when we learned that we could buy sheep at character generation. i also got a pigletlet (a diminutive piglet) named george :7

how it happened

armed with 13 sheep, a shortbow, and a single sword, we set out from the centre of our hexmap, initially heading east, where we immediately hit mountains. on our second day, we headed south, where we got caught in open plains by a wyvern, which we assumed must have come from the mountains we’d seen the previous day. we decided to split up, harlaw would try to lure the wyvern away from the sheep with his bow and denin would herd the sheep in the opposite direction. the wyvern devoured three sheep before we rolled positive on a reaction table, signalling that its hunger had been sated.. for now.

from there we wandered pretty aimlessly, gradually heading to the northern edge of our play area, before zig-zagging our way back down, we had absolutely horrendous luck and didn’t roll a single feature, despite using the smaller ‘settled’ feature die. on our way back south, we encountered a giant toad, which we slaughtered mercilessly for its meat, as by this point we had already had to butcher our sheep, pamick, who had an itchy coat, which we deemed was the least worth keeping around, since we couldn’t eat the meat of the sickly sheep, cale.

one interesting side effect of our bad luck with the features generator was the fact that we had heard no stories of this great beast, which, in volume 2: MONSTERS & (the monster manual supplement for wolves upon the coast), resulted in an extremely weak and feeble critter. shortly after this, we were beset by a marsh filled with a “teeming buzz” as per the spark table. we took this to mean that the hex was infested with mosquitos, which bit three of our sheep, worsening their condition and putting cale in danger of death.

thankfully, we finally encountered seawater, which we used to disinfect our sheep’s wounds and bring them back to their previous condition. heading east from the ocean, we encountered mountains, which we took as a cliff face up against the sea. the tide rising and leaving us at the cliffs’ base, we saw only two options. we could abandon half of our flock and attempt to scale the cliff, or herd them south through the night to escape the rising waves. we chose the latter option. with hindsight, i think it would have been more interesting if we had made the option we chose more challenging, through some sort of test or other mechanical difficulty.

our last hex for the night was an extremely flat, snow-white beach, which we thought was just a real coooool image.

so, what’s the takeaway?

this was a really fun experiment and i’ll definitely be trying it again. it’d for sure be more interesting with more players, especially if you can delegate running certain parts of the generator between different people. there’d also probably be more roleplay opportunity, since there’s only so much two people can talk about while running the engine and trying not to die. another thing which i’d definitely want to include in future would be a proper good weather generator, since i find that that really helps to convey the passing of time and make the whole crawl way more engaging (as did using spark tables to really drill into what we were encountering wrt to the terrain).

compared to my most recent experience with hexcrawls (mythic bastionland), this was extremely different. both playstyles are quite boardgamey but this felt very much like a brain-training exercise, whereas mythy B is much more prep-heavy (though, that prep is very enjoyable in my experience). as i said earlier though, i think it would feel a lot less boardgamelike and be more roleplay-heavy if there were more players.

combat could potentially be expanded on, for our encounter with the wyvern, it felt pretty natural for it to be going after the sheep and we did reaction rolls to see if it would be distracted by harlaw’s shots or go after denin but it never came to that. in a more evenly matched combat i could easily see this system getting too complicated, so i’m not quite sure how you’d approach it then. for the toad encounter, given that it was by our interpretation just an abnormally large toad, we didn’t run real combat and just handled it with a test by denin with support from harlaw.

if you’re interested to learn more, contact me at the places listed elsewhere on here, i’d love to make something like this happen again with a larger group.