Just One Thing Per Hex

 Hex Crawls are something I think about often, especially considering the best campaign I ever ran was one. Many a great theses have been written on the Hex Crawl too, from Prismatic's seminal Hex Crawl Checklist (seriously if you're ever going to write a Hex Crawl read this and jump into whatever links interest you), to a personal favorite Silver Arm Press' Down With the Six Mile Hex[*2]. Most recently I was enamored with ONEZERO's post HEXEMBER: Stinging-Tree Canyon (If you haven't read any of V.V's works they're phenomenal, so go and treat yourself). However I was struck by how (personally) I wouldn't run this as just one hex, but several, separating the three points of interest out. In essence, only having Just One Thing Per Hex...

The first Fallout game is one of those uniquely textured titles that tends to leave a mark on the people who play it. And it's not just the hauntingly beautiful soundtrack that brings to life a windswept wasteland. While not strictly a Hex Crawl, traveling across Fallout's open world map captures a certain flavor of overland journeying that I think layers spectacularly onto TTRPGs.

For the unacquainted, in Fallout the map takes one of two forms: Either a zoomed in isometric map, where items can be looted, NPCs can be chatted up and tactical combat can be had, or a zoomed out "world map" that can be freely traveled with a click. This map is divided into squares (often covered by a fog of war), and your ever-present deadline ticks closer with each step (with different terrains taking longer to cross). Most "locations" are clearly marked with a green circle [see also Landmarks as Hooks] allowing you to "zoom in" there. Similarly, random encounters will "zoom you in" to a particular location, and you can go exploring any given spot whenever you'd like (though usually this'll simply bring you to an empty map).

This is all very Hex Crawl 101, but what I think is most important here is that each location really only has Just One Thing going on. It may be be a dungeon that needs to be revisited like Vault 15, or a hub for trade like Shady Sands, but generally each location (even if there's multiple quests and NPCs related to it) can be summed up in a sentence or two.

What this does is help players create a very strong mental map of the area, and let each hex tile shine in its own unique way. There's an old idiom among GMs and designers that "subtlety rarely survives contact with the table"[*1] and this is a means of applying a that lesson to Hex map design.

Spy in the House of Eth, my all-time favorite Hex Crawl by Zedeck Siew serves as an excellent example of what this looks like in action:

This follows all the conventions of a good Hex Crawl map, from landmarks that hook you in, to roads that gently guide less excitable players through the big adventure beats, to random encounters for each region that are so so so damn good and memorable. For a Crawl that's only 58 pages long, it really shouldn't be in a staple-bound zine format it packs a novel's worth of punch, intera-faction politics and nuance. But I think part of that memorability comes from how briefly most of the encounters and hexes can be described.

Camphor Port is a stratified port town with a murder mystery afoot. The Mangrove God is an otherworldly tree hidden in the forest. Granny's Teat is a cavern converted into a nightmarish bird swarm's nest.

OK but can't we do this with a point crawl? No actually. Because another key element here comes from being able to freely explore any given hex that might have something that isn't marked yet. Once we create the expectation that a Hex usually has Just One Thing, it creates the expectation that any Hex might have something interesting without being overwhelming to track for GMs and players alike, nor requiring excessive exploration after the Just One Thing is found. Exploring the unknown now takes the form of passing through unexplored Hexes to see if the "Just One Thing" pops up.

In this way you can have NPCs mark a specific Hex on the map, or treasure maps that clearly lead to a specific Hex with the built up assumption that that'll be the Hex's One Thing. Is this more Game-y than it is a real-world depiction of the infinite complexity of any square foot of our planet? Absolutely. But it makes for interesting decision-making when choosing which Hexes to go through and why. ((See also for example, this map that players dug up from a junk yard:

This isn't to say locations themselves can't still have the nuance of Landmark, Hidden, Secret - But rather that all of those should tie-in directly to the main location and be (roughly) telegraphed. To go back to the Vault 15 example, it's a clear Landmark from the start of the game, the fact that there's no Water Chip there is Hidden until you explore it, and there's a Leather Jacket that's secretly hidden requiring you to use a rope to climb through an elevator. Similarly Eth House is a dilapidated manor harboring all kinds of secrets I won't spoil here.

Hex Crawls also enhances how we can write random encounters. We can now say encounters only happen on an empty Hex (ones without the Just One Thing), and some of those encounters could add locations in and of themselves that can permanently stay on the map without players worrying if there's other "locations" in the hex ~ (Be it a bandit camp, a bear cave, or perhaps a merchant's shack - You'd need to build some deterministic odds into your encounter rolls, but we can talk about that another time) - A little procedural generation can add some spice to an otherwise Blorbbed hex map.

Moreover it allows you to do interesting location-based "infections" which spread from Hex to Hex - Be they a raging civil war, a virulent virus, an undead horde or (in the case of Spy in the House of Eth), the literal merger pun intended of another reality:

These kinds of "infections" would be incredibly cumbersome to track in a point crawl, but become easy as pulling out a colored pencil in a hex crawl. Combined with having Just One Thing Per Hex, and players get a very intimate sense of what's at stake whenever one Hex is bordering an "infected" Hex.

BONUS ROUND: So I haven't played Sid Meier’s Civilization® VI yet, but the idea of cities being broken out into districts sounds very interesting, and an excellent example of what Just One Thing Per Hex might look like when the players approach a city on the map. (For context, instead of a city occupying a single hex in Civ 6, there's a city center, then "districts" on the surrounding hexes, each specializing in some facet like military or science. To say this can have implications for domain play is an understatement). It also makes sieges and natural disasters both tenser and easier to visually track from the world map. Plus you can do neat stuff like having a poorer district Hex be "infected", but a more central and upscale district is "immune" to it.

So if I ever publish my own Hex Crawl, and you notice there's Just One Thing Per Hex, now you know why! What do you think? Would you prefer if more Hex Crawls had Just One Thing Per Hex?

[*1 : So obviously this is a paraphrase, and I don't even fully agree with the sentiment, but I think there's something to this. For instance, I find NPCs that have big obvious character traits get more interaction and memorability than ones that are subtly nuanced.]

[*2 : Some background: I walk absolutely everywhere. My usual work day involves walking about 3 miles on my commute to-and-fro, and I used to live on (and run courier for) the UMass Amherst campus which is pretty sizable to say the least. Personally I don't like putting actual milage on a hex (much like I don't like putting actual seconds to actions), and certainly (to me) the six mile hex feels far, far too big.]