Would anyone be interested in collaborating with me on rules for a West Marches-style hexcrawl/exploration game? I’d like to develop rules for:
Hex exploration and road building.
Building a guildhall for the players that can be upgraded to give small bonuses to the whole group.
Creating and advancing fronts with round-robin GMs.
Encouraging GMing in this environment.
I’m interested.
Sounds really interesting. Are there any other hexcrawl games you can think of that might be similar? If so, I’d like to check them out to get a better sense of your idea.
A key question to consider is whether there are competing factions, like an orc army exploring and settling the map from the other direction. And if so, who plays the orcs?
There are several map – creation RPGs out there one could hack together with Dungeon World, although doing so might be outside the topics or scope of this Community.
Thanks for your interest.
Vinney Cavallo I may steal a few ideas from Pathfinder’s Ultimate Campaign book.
Starting with the idea of exploration… How will would a traditional hex map work in DW? Since the basic unit of distance is “one day’s journey”, could we do “it takes one day to cross one hex” as a general rule? Thinks like difficult terrain would takes two days, roads or horses make it less.
I think that scale of travel would work fine. Would there be a “fog of war” effect where the map is hidden until explored?
The thing I thought about with 1-day-per-hex is you’ll often have the experience of: “I walk across a desert today, make camp and wake up in a forest tomorrow”. that is, the scenery only changes on an overnight basis out of the box. I guess it’s a minor thing that is solved by slightly creative GMing.. (like, towards the end of the trek describe how the surroundings are beginning to change and continue the next morning)
Delos Adamski Yes, that’s the idea.
Vinney Cavallo The journey itself is fast forwarded to some extent, since the real action is at the adventure site. The Undertake a Perilous Journey abstracts this.
Yeah don’t worry about the boring bits. If nothing exciting happens then just skip over.
This would be awesome
I guess I imagined that random encounters would happen along the way as well as at the adventure site – making the wilds actually feel wild. You’d then have to pause the “fast-forward”, at which point a more granular idea of what’s going on in the hexes would be useful.
Alexander Davis made a hex-exploring-themed post recently – that is what’s brining all these thoughts to mind : )
Vinney Cavallo : My standard hexes are about 24 miles – which is eight hours of walking on roughly even terrain. So, in the jungle, we are really looking at 16-24 hours to cross. I usually assume eight hours of travel a day, by the way.
One caveat is that, I won’t be using perilous journey and I will be using random encounters. Further, encounters “explode” – that is, if I get an encounter in a given hex, I will roll again (so, some hexes might have two or more encounters).
Really, I want to focus on the journey as much as anything (though, others may differ), and perilous journey doesn’t help (though, I will use perilous for going back to places they’ve already been, or if they have a very good idea where they’re headed).
Yea, I guess I was unconsciously digging Alexander Davis’s “Really, I want to focus on the journey as much as anything” approach and trying to retrofit everything into that (since i like it a lot 🙂
Philip Burge That would be great, if you could find that for me!
Let’s discuss exploring hexes. What has been discussed about this before?
Philip Burge, I LOVE that. I’m gonna go check that out really thoroughly.
I originally envisioned a game more objective-focused. That is, the action would take place in adventure sites revealed on the map almost exclusively, and revealing more hexes would be a reward. Though I’m now reconsidering.
Anyways, what should go into exploring/revealing a hex?