Populated Hexcrawl

[MrZJunior]

Hexcrawls are supposed to take place in the wilderness. Could one still work in a more populated setting? It seems like there would be less exploration if you can find road signs and ask people what's over the next hill.

[Mastikator]

You could do a population that is not the same species as the player character's and the PCs have no connection to them. You get to keep all the exploration up until the PCs make friends with the population. How to solve that? Multiple competing species.

[MrZJunior]

How do multiple, competing species solve this issue?

[zlefin]

Anything can work with a great DM and great players. With a populated hexcrawl, the basic question would be: what are you actually doing? Why are you wandering around the lands exploring the hexes? If the area is already populated, and especially if it's densely populated; there shouldn't be particular issues with monsters hanging around without people knowing about them, and there should already be maps of the area.

Another question is: are you locals? If you're local to the area, you should already know it pretty well, so why bother exploring? Whereas if you're non-locals, you might be gathering more detailed info on the area for someone. Even if there's people to talk to, you might want to be verifying some things for yourself.

I can think of some ideas, though most would probably not be interesting adventures or ones people want to do, but they could be plausibly done, or at least some of them could:

Tax collectors; who knows how many people are actually living in each hex? How much are they hiding so as to minimize their taxes?

Surveyors: building much more detailed maps of the area.

Expert knowledges: analyzing the area for something that commoners wouldn't take much notice of, or at least not understand, such as unusual localized magic phenomena, rare herbs, unusual materials or rocks, rare animals.

Scouting: you're from a foreign power and are gathering data on the local populace and the local political situation, as well as some maps which could be very useful should war occur.

Law enforcement: bandits exist, as do poachers, sometimes people hide things in woods or elsewhere. Your job is to find them and deal with them.

[Vahnavoi]

If it's a well-known area, just give your players a partially filled hex map with roads. As long as they follow roads, they get from one hex to another with no issue, but also don't find anything off the beaten track.

Remember: hexes cover a lot of terrain, population density even in an inhabited area might not be all that big. Even a populated hex might be mostly unmapped forest etc., with settlement taking up just a fraction of it.

[vasilidor]

A populated area that has a monster problem and the party is a paid group of exterminators. they have to find the monster hive and exterminate it for the good of the community. Different areas have different clues and different things that could possibly aid or hinder the party.

[Segev]

Hexcrawls are supposed to take place in the wilderness. Could one still work in a more populated setting? It seems like there would be less exploration if you can find road signs and ask people what's over the next hill.

The purpose of the specific form of adventure known as the hex crawl is to take a space that lacks obvious destinations and break it up, letting you fill in destinations to be discovered and later planned to travel to.

IF you've got it heavily populated, such that you can just do some research or talking to find out what's out there, it becomes more about planning a trip with regular civilized stops. Depending how densely populated it is, travelling with little more than money would be perfectly viable as you buy shelter and food along the way.

IT becomes less about survival and more about routing. Less about discovery on the broad scale and more about choosing destinations to go to to do things.

The discovery happens on a smaller geographic scale, in the towns and cities or the like. Cities can be run remarkably similarly to dungeons, or as further "you're in the general area; where do you want to go within it?" to have specific destinations.

It's actually easier to run a densely-populated area, as long as you have it mapped well, because you can just say where the party goes and how long it takes to get there.

[The Glyphstone]

I ran a sci-fi game with a hexcrawl format once, in a 'lost' region of space where some of the planets still hosted lost colonies cut off from the wider civilization. So they were inhabited, but isolated enough that they didn't know anything about the surrounding regions. Something similar might be adaptable to a land terrain hexcrawl; all you need is plausible reasons for why the inhabitants of one settlement are restricted to their area before the party shows up. Hostile monsters, dangerous terrain, social barriers, etc.

[DwarfFighter]

How about a Hex Crawl in a mega-city like Judge Dredd's Mega City One, a Warhammer 40K Hive City, or a Star Wars City World?