Filling the Map - Making a Hexcrawl

Making a hexcrawl for Of Hearth & the Harrowing is central to how a gamemaster sets up the world that the players will interact with. While the story of the Harrowing and the idea of corruption are central to the game system, the application of that to a game world is up to the gamemaster. Of course, we provide a land to set the game, but many gamemasters may wish to expand that land themselves, or replace it entirely with a corrupted land of their own. We have plans to publish region and adventure site books to support the game, but they are not needed to run the game.

In the book there is a 'Sandbox Creation' section that can help a gamemaster do just that. It walks your through the creation of a realm, one region at a time. Regions are groups of hexes (generally 5x5 hexes, or a what I refer to as a mega hex on the world map). The book maps out 7 mega hex regions for the corrupted land of Eragion, and details one region for kicking off the campaign.

To create a sandbox you need 2 big things to start, terrain and factions. Either can come first, there is not one right way.

• Starting with terrain allows you to divide up the regions and hexes into different terrain types that make sense from a geographical point of view to then layer in on top factions and settlements and such.

• Starting with factions lets you craft the story first, who are the people of the lands, and how are they divided up, then you can hand place terrain as natural barriers to explain the nature of the divisions between the people.

Both ways are perfectly fine, and I have done both with the same amount of success. If you can't decide, the default for me is starting with terrain and letting it help you craft the story of the factions, but that's just me.

Once you have the major overview of key points of terrain and factions you can start dropping in details. The most important of these are adventure sites and settlements.

• Adventure Sites - These are the places heroes seek out to find treasure and adventure. There should be a few in each mega hex.

• Settlements - In many games there are the safe spaces between adventure sites. Of Hearth & the Harrowing treats them as a different kind of adventuring site as most settlements in the corrupted lands are not safe spaces. That is what the Hearth is for.

Regardless of how you treat the two above, you will want to put a few hexes between each Adventure Site, between each settlement, and between most Adventure Sites and Settlements. These empty hexes are the liminal spaces that heroes travel through to get to where they are going, and give them places to explore without every hex having an Adventure Site to explore or a settlement to interact with.

In Of Hearth & the Harrowing each hex is defined by its corruption level. This allows a gamemaster to determine the sorts of things that will be found within. Corruption spreads from corruption sources (like adventure sites and settlements) to infect the spaces in between. It is up to the heroes to deal with those sources, making the lands a safer place for them (and others) to inhabit later.

Finally, ever hex should have a point of interest. In settlement and adventure site hexes these are the points of interest, but in liminal spaces the point of interest should be something the gamemaster determines is in the hex that the heroes can come upon if they explore the hex.

These can range from small lairs (no more than an encounter or two) to landmarks, to remnants of the world before the Harrowing. They should be able to be fully explored by the heroes in a small amount of in game time, and should not take more than half an hour to an hour table time to fully explore. These should be memorable, as that is how the players will remember the hex. Some examples from my recent playtest game:

• The abandoned shanty town near the beach - Where the campaign began when they were let of a ship on the beach

• The abondened farms with the urn burial sites - Where they traveled through on their way to a large set of ruins on a nearby hilltop (see Castle Caras).

• The ruins of Castle Caras (Adventure Site) - The site of the last two sessions and now the heroes new Hearth.

• An unexplored hex - They travelled through it along a river and did not explore the hex since they were headed to...

• The town of Estiranta (Settlement)

By taking the approach of starting with Terrain (or Factions) then moving to Factions (or Terrain) you get the basis for the general shape of the land. Adding in Adventure Sites and Settlements begins to make the possibilities of the campaign begin to take shape. Finally, adding points of interest to the hexes between Adventure Sites and Settlements fills in the world with things for the player's to interact with and discover.

Once you have all of this in place you begin. Besides just expanding the area of the sandbox, the things you can then begin to layer in if you like is interactions between the adventure sites or settlements, rumors to what is out there, and encounter tables that pull from the adventure sites and settlements to ground them into the sandbox.