How many adventure locations in a hex?

[PhoenixPhyre]

I'm working on fleshing out maps for my D&D 5e setting, and I've realized I place things way far apart. As in, it's multiple days' travel between any two adventure locations, or between an adventure location and a town. As a result, parties end up traveling all over the place, even at low level. This makes them less connected to their home-base locations and ends up feeling somewhat like a David Eddings novel (travelogue-style, crossing the world twice before the quest's over). I'd like to add more, but I'm not sure what makes sense.

So I turn to y'all. Assume a hex map with two levels--one with a hex size of about a day's travel (25-30 miles) and a second inset map with 6-mile hexes. From experience with hexcrawls, with adventures past in various systems, and with any other experience, how many adventure locations make sense within a hex? Adventure locations might be graveyards, monster lairs, dungeon entrances, ruins, bandit camps, eeeeeeevil forests, etc. I'm not really worried about urban adventures at this point, so those can be neglected.

I figure it will depend strongly on the wildness of the area, so maybe three "zones", each with a range?

* Civilized zones--low threat, things mostly cleared out.
* wilderness zones--medium threat, more monsters.
* Hot-spots--high threat, high density.

Any suggestions? Places to look? Sources?

[Vitruviansquid]

I can't work out why this matters.

Unless you're playing a system that tracks supplies and time and makes it matter, the effect of an adventuring party traveling for a few hours and a few days is the same.

The amount of actual time it takes the DM to say "your group sets forth and reaches the ogre lair after three hours' walk" and "your group sets forth and reaches the ogre lair after three days walk" is pretty much the same.

[PhoenixPhyre]

I can't work out why this matters.

Unless you're playing a system that tracks supplies and time and makes it matter, the effect of an adventuring party traveling for a few hours and a few days is the same.

The amount of actual time it takes the DM to say "your group sets forth and reaches the ogre lair after three hours' walk" and "your group sets forth and reaches the ogre lair after three days walk" is pretty much the same.

It doesn't, really, but I like having maps. I run a bunch of groups in the same setting area and they're all varying levels of sandboxes. Unless I know where things are (and how many things they're likely to run into along the way), it's hard to make it feel real. It also gives me more impetus to give them stuff to do locally, without overloading the area. It also makes less sense for them to go three days to fight ogres if there's likely to be other nasties within a day's travel that are more pressing.

I want to pre-generate a bunch of minor locations so that as they're traveling they can run into things along the way. This will be very important for my next campaign. I'd also like to lay the foundations so that if I had a group interested in a hexcrawl they could do that with some of the work done in advance.

[Vitruviansquid]

Alright, well it seems to me that you want to have a good mix of both.

Maybe take your locations and evaluate them based on how exotic you want each of them to be in comparison to your PC party's starting location.

A bandit camp might be low on exoticism, because bandits are kind of a mundane threat and they need to be close to people in order to profit.
A particularly dangerous forest might be a bit higher on exoticism, it being dangerous solely because people don't go there much or else it would be more of a tamed place.
A trading post of the neighboring people might be high on exoticism because if you want your players to go trade with the foreigners, it would feel good to the plot for them to travel a bit far to do it.

Once you've decided how exotic each location should be, see if you're lacking any category. Did all your locations turn out to be pretty high on exoticism? Come up with a few more locations to place closer to the starting location.

[Nifft]

Just as a thought exercise, consider that each of the following fit within one hex:
- The Free City of Greyhawk
- Waterdeep, City of Splendors
- Sharn, City of Towers


IMHO, the number of adventure locations within a hex must depend on a number of factors:

• The absolute size of a hex, which obviously varies from map to map.

• The terrain type within that hex -- there's more room for discrete locations in terrain composed of dense forested hilly river-land with lakes, than desolate wasteland, and that's in part because the definition of desolate demands that there's not much there.

• How you define "adventure location". Like, if there's a lake with three villages around it (gnome / lizardfolk / human), and the waterfall feeding the lake has an extensive cave system under it, and the cave system links to the ruins of a dungeon, and the dungeon sits under a haunted castle ruin above the waterfall, and there's a dragon cave under the lake... how many "adventure locations" is that?

[PhoenixPhyre]

Just as a thought exercise, consider that each of the following fit within one hex:
- The Free City of Greyhawk
- Waterdeep, City of Splendors
- Sharn, City of Towers


This is why I'm discounting urban adventures for now. Those are a completely separate matter (that, truth be told, I don't run much of).



IMHO, the number of adventure locations within a hex must depend on a number of factors:

• The absolute size of a hex, which obviously varies from map to map.

• The terrain type within that hex -- there's more room for discrete locations in terrain composed of dense forested hilly river-land with lakes, than desolate wasteland, and that's in part because the definition of desolate demands that there's not much there.

• How you define "adventure location". Like, if there's a lake with three villages around it (gnome / lizardfolk / human), and the waterfall feeding the lake has an extensive cave system under it, and the cave system links to the ruins of a dungeon, and the dungeon sits under a haunted castle ruin above the waterfall, and there's a dragon cave under the lake... how many "adventure locations" is that?

That's food for thought. I'm working on the 1 hex = 1 day's travel mental scale. As to the third point, I'd probably say that that's 5 separate locations (more if the lake is huge enough that the villages are non-interacting:

1. Surface (lake + villages)
2. Caves
3. Dungeon
4. Haunted Castle
5. Dragon's Den

You can have any one of these be a separate destination for a quest--the villages request help to settle a dispute, exploring the caves, exploring the dungeon, un-haunting the castle, fighting the dragon. It does make me think of how tightly connected the areas might be--my natural inclination is to spread things out. But that might be counterproductive...

[Nifft]

That's food for thought. I'm working on the 1 hex = 1 day's travel mental scale. That's not really a hex, because a day's travel in a dense virgin forest or through a winding mountain pass is not the same distance as a day's travel over a well-maintained road on a plain.

Unless it's like "one day's flight for a dragon" which could be equal regardless of the terrain.


As to the third point, I'd probably say that that's 5 separate locations (more if the lake is huge enough that the villages are non-interacting:

1. Surface (lake + villages)
2. Caves
3. Dungeon
4. Haunted Castle
5. Dragon's Den

You can have any one of these be a separate destination for a quest--the villages request help to settle a dispute, exploring the caves, exploring the dungeon, un-haunting the castle, fighting the dragon. It does make me think of how tightly connected the areas might be--my natural inclination is to spread things out. But that might be counterproductive...

I'd suggest thinking of connectivity in terms of plot, rather than space.

So the 3 villages could be one location if they are tightly interconnected by plot, or they could be 3 separate locations if they are all getting along with each other but there's disconnected stuff to do in each village. The space doesn't matter -- the plot connectivity does.

[PhoenixPhyre]

That's not really a hex, because a day's travel in a dense virgin forest or through a winding mountain pass is not the same distance as a day's travel over a well-maintained road on a plain.

Unless it's like "one day's flight for a dragon" which could be equal regardless of the terrain.



I'd suggest thinking of connectivity in terms of plot, rather than space.

So the 3 villages could be one location if they are tightly interconnected by plot, or they could be 3 separate locations if they are all getting along with each other but there's disconnected stuff to do in each village. The space doesn't matter -- the plot connectivity does.

Yeah, I was doing 1 hex = 1 days travel in good terrain (so more through hard terrain) = ~30 miles.

But for hex-crawl or non-linear-plot purposes, thinking in connectivity doesn't help me. I don't generally plan grand plots more than a couple sessions out, but having a bunch of pre-generated locations on a map allows me to send them places as I need to without having continuity problems. It also lets me handle multiple groups in the same setting much more smoothly. So space does matter. Even if group 1 goes to village 1 (but not village 2 or 3), it will matter if the other villages are nearby when another group needs to go to all three of them together.

[Jama7301]

I've been struggling with this lately as well, as I started to construct a Hex map. The inset Hexes are an interesting thing I may toy with.

[Mastikator]

Anywhere between zero and a hundred? It only makes sense if it's uneven, clustered and centralized.

[LibraryOgre]

So I turn to y'all. Assume a hex map with two levels--one with a hex size of about a day's travel (25-30 miles) and a second inset map with 6-mile hexes. From experience with hexcrawls, with adventures past in various systems, and with any other experience, how many adventure locations make sense within a hex? Adventure locations might be graveyards, monster lairs, dungeon entrances, ruins, bandit camps, eeeeeeevil forests, etc. I'm not really worried about urban adventures at this point, so those can be neglected.

I figure it will depend strongly on the wildness of the area, so maybe three "zones", each with a range?

* Civilized zones--low threat, things mostly cleared out.
* wilderness zones--medium threat, more monsters.
* Hot-spots--high threat, high density.

Any suggestions? Places to look? Sources?

Generally, I'd say that you're mostly going to be looking at 1 per large hex, and no more than 1 per small hex.

So, in a 30 mile hex, you probably only have 1 adventure location... one ruined castle, one cave complex, one haunted graveyard. That ruined castle is where the bad guys mostly hang out in the region... if you have a lot of bad guys in one place, they're either fighting or allied.

If you have a more densely adventure-populated area, then you're still going to only have about 1 per small hex... the castle complex won't be on top of the haunted graveyard and won't be on top of the cave complex, without the two or three being explicitly connected and part of the same general setting. So, the cave complex might go up into the castle, but it's not going to be entirely separate from the castle and still nearby... if it is, the people inside would've tamed it or been defeated by it, by now.

[Lvl 2 Expert]

I'd say this is almost entirely flavor dependent. If you want your world to be super willd and adventurous every zoomed in hex could contain something, even if it's just a haunted part of the forest, a cove of witches or a burial mound with a two room dungeon inside. If you want to go for a more feel of dangerous things as rare and powerful stuff everything is hidden at least days away form civilization. The lich's castle is up on the rocky peaks of this mountain range, and the entire thing is his domain, with just a few rock trolls roaming around whom he allows to live there in place of more traditional guards. That's one adventure location per a whole bunch of hexes.

If you want to use this map system optimally you're probably going to want roughly one adventure location per hex, sometimes two in the wilder parts, big city states can sit on clean hexes. If there are any hexes they never get to zoom in on that's just a bit of a waste of map making, plus it seems like you are flavor wise trying to avoid overly long travel times.

[Psikerlord]

Why uses hexes at all. Just use a keyed map with a scale. Put your ruins etc wherever you please.

[TheStranger]

From a game design standpoint, the answer is probably one. Mostly because if you have multiple significant locations per hex and your players want to explore them, you'll need to map out the interior of the hex as well at a zoomed-in scale, so you'll still end up with one adventure location per hex, the hexes will just be smaller.

From a "realism" standpoint, a 25-30 mile hex would have dozens, if not hundreds, of interesting locations. Whether those are "adventure" locations is up to you, of course. But as a thought exercise, how many towns (or distinct neighborhoods if you're in a city), lakes, dams, waterfalls, hills, forests, swamps, cemeteries, cliffs, caves, abandoned buildings, etc. are within even 10 miles of your home? How many other areas are there that could have those things, but you don't actually know because you've never been there? Remember, a hexagon 25 miles on a side contains 1600 square miles of interesting things.

[Lvl 2 Expert]

Remember, a hexagon 25 miles on a side contains 1600 square miles of interesting things.

As a comparison: the country of Luxembourg is almost exactly a 1000 square miles in size. It's large enough to be split up into a low mountainous and hilly lowland part. It has 12 official towns/cities (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_towns_in_Luxembourg), the largest of which is a bit over 100,000 inhabitants, with 3 more between 20,000 and 35,000 people. (The smallest is almost 2000 folks, so it's safe to say there are a few more clumps of houses where smaller groups of people live.) It borders a single major shipping river in the Moselle but contains a number of other streams (http://www.luxcentral.com/LuxGazetteer.html) large enough to function as either a road or roadblock to adventurers.

It even looks a bit like an adventuring hex.

I might in fact be a nice worldbuilding exercise to try out the smaller scale of your map system on Luxembourg. Filling a 25-30 mile hex with 5-6 mile hexes gives a standard Catan board of 19 small hexes, see if that's enough to map out a place like this in the amount of detail you want. (There is an official version (http://catan.wikia.com/wiki/Catan:_Luxembourg), but it uses too many hexes for this comparison and places the resources all wrong. The tiny mining area gets zero mines and two forests while the (relatively) large foresty area gets only two forests and two mines.)

(Of course the part of Europe Luxembourg is located in is kind of densely populated in general, depending on what kind of world you're going for there might be better models to try your system out on.)

[Florian]

how many adventure locations make sense within a hex?

Sorta-kinda wrong question you ask there.

Question is more how many interconnected locations you can cram together before they start becoming a sandbox within your sandbox, shifting the focus of the game and whether you want that to happen or not.

When you have that eerie small fishing town, the old manor house, the extended family crypt, the old keep, a sinister monastery, legend of an artifact weapon and whatever is going on with the bay all in one place, the game can change as players become invested in solving that particular riddle instead of exploring the world.

[Logosloki]

How long do you and your party want to spend in one super hex at a time? That is going to determine the number of adventures in a zone.

For needless complicated (and complete indulgence) roll a d6 for each super hex. One to five gives you that many adventures in a super hex. On a six that hex gains six adventures and in a randomly chosen (or not) subhex a major world changing event is occurring. The influence of world changing event is that each super hex adjacent gains d4 adventures based on the world changing event. Err a bit here, if the randomly chosen subhex is more righty maybe only the two right most sides (or three sides, depends on how you laid out your hex grid) gain bonus adventures.

How to fudge this: Give yourself a few world changing events tokens that you can place down if the entire thing looks a bit bare. Make a world changing event something like two kingdoms throwing down so each of those kingdoms counts as an event (double the adventures). While you are generating 1-5 adventures you don't have to make them small either, link them up so that events in an adventure cause a change in another nearby adventures. Each major population centre (and/or seat of power. Maybe a particular area is people poor but a major trade/ritual site, etc) counts as an adventure separate to the hex roll (Doesn't have to occur in the population centre, it can be that there is a trail to/from/through there).

Really also depends on how many sessions each adventure will take and how big your map is.