Hex-crawl GM aid software?

[harpy]

I'd imagine software like I want exists, but google is failing me.

I'd like to have a piece of software that can generate a lot of the gritty details of a hex-crawl style sandbox game, so that at any given time I can have the "conditions on the ground" at my fingertips with a laptop.

Basically you'd have software that would let you import a map and then define regions via hexes, which would group the area into climates, even micro-climates. Then we just hex-crawl away and as the GM I can tell the players at any given time:

Date (have a whole calendar defined)
Season
Time of day
Temperature
Precipitation
Cloud cover
Lighting (as affected by the sun, moon, stars, clouds)
Visibility (from fog, haze, etc.)

Along with that, being able to do regular survival rolls to see if they are lost, and if they are randomly move them into a different hex.

Generate random encounters, which would be defined by region, CR range, creature type, and any treasure. All of this would be modified by speed of travel, visibility, etc.

Keep track of food and water expenditure (at the party level, not individual level).

Keep track of this on an interval set by the GM, so it could be minute by minute, 10 minutes, half-hour, hourly.

Finally, keep track of the route they have passed through visually with the hex map.

Is there anything software out there that does a least a good portion of this?

[JackRackham]

Something like this would be crazy useful, but I don't know of anything.

[Retech]

Is this for Kingmaker by any chance?

[Grendus]

Dungeonographer and it's extension Hexographer might be what you're looking for. Never used it, but it's supposed to be a great tool. http://www.dungeonographer.com/

[nedz]

I wrote something similar for my own world a few years ago.
The map is broken down into 180 mile hexes with a 5 mile hex grid over the top.
It also has a gazateer which allows you to define towns etc with basic economics, temples, etc. This also has a goto function (which is useful for teleports).
It also did 2E encounters, but that was never finished and is now obselete.
I wanted to add tracking features, but couldn't work out the interface.
I never took it beyond the alpha test stage eg you have to edit the map with Paint :smallsmile: but maybe one day I'll finish it.

[harpy]

A friend is looking into a gaming software project, he's keen on the idea of "emergent behavior" that would happen in a world regardless of what the players are doing. I suggested that he might want to slowly build up to that by creating utilities that could help a GM generate a lot of dynamic content that normally would be tedious to do by hand.

I have Hexographer and looked over Dungeographer. Hexographer is a great visual that could be a top layer to the interface. Dungeographer looks like it would be fun to use.

I guess the end goal is to have some kind of software that a kind of Sim-Sandbox. You'd have a world being simulated, with NPCs doing their thing, much like Sim-City and the like, but that isn't the game, but rather just a content-contextualizing backdrop for the real use which is to have the players roaming through a sandbox hexcrawl game going on adventures.

But if no one has heard of anything like this then I guess that's good. It's new territory to explore. I just remember that over the years there have been "DM tool" type software suits that did a lot of different utility elements for D&D or other RPGs. I'd have thought someone would push it farther into supporting sandbox gaming in a procedural manner.

[Randomguy]

Ever heard of battle for wesnoth? Technically it's a strategy game rather than a map editor, but it's free, it's hex based and it comes with it's own map editor. It's also open source, so it's easy to make your own add ons for it. I bet one with most of these things probably already exists.

It has time of day, visibility and it can be made to keep track of food and other resources via add ons.
It has about a hundred different types of terrain, including cave, shallow water, deep water, plains, road, hills, mountains, swamp, forest, snow, ice and various combinations (such as snowy forest on hills).
It has how the terrain affects different units, but that system is very different from Dnd.
It can generate random encounters.
There are ways to make one hex teleport you to another hex, so there's probably a way to randomize that process.
Each unit has it's own speed of travel.

It should be worth checking out, at the very least.

[harpy]

I played Wesnoth ages ago. It sounds like it's developed quite a bit since I last tried it. It does sound interesting.

I suspect my friend aims for anything he does to be commercial though. He's got some kids and can't see his wife tolerating such a big time commitment without some money flowing back into the house, even if it is to just cover the cost of diapers.