In Dungeon World it is a core aspect of the rules that whole group, players and GM, work together to build the campaign world. So the map of this campaign gets built as we play the game and my hex-crawl rule needed to be light enough for me to full in the map as we go. So far i am really liking this world and intend to use it for any future fantasy games i play. So here is Stradwald and the rules i have made up to run it. my hex-crawl rules are designed to fill in the specifics not create the whole world. I will provide an examples of how Stradwald was built as i go
when I started this Campaign I told the players what the initial situation was and started asking a lot of questions of the players as per dungeon world rules. The conversation went something like this:
ME: you are all peasants in a small village that has been plagued by constant attacks by dog men for the last month. Currently you are huddled in the town hall, and dog men are attempting to bash down the door. where have the dog men come from and why?
PC's: they come from the woods.... ya and they come to steal our children
Me: cool, they also want to kill you. tell me one special thing about the woods?
PC's: it is moldy and rotting.....
ME: ok so the dog men come from the rot-wood. What is the name of your town?
PC's: uh... Dragon's end
ME: what happened to give it that name?
PC's: ... Well there is a legend that a dragon drowned in the river nearby
ME: wow. was it a pathetic dragon or a really powerful river? are there many rivers nearby? How does the town use the river?
PC's: well there is only the one river... It's like this wide shallow river.. The Mississippi! it is fantasy Mississippi!... Ya! And there are tons of swamps all around. so the dragon sorta sank and got stuck... And the town... Uses the river to move logs to a city down river.
ME: so this nation is all swamps and Forrest. Cool. What is the nation's name?
PC's: ...I don't know uh..your putting me on the spot... The uh... Suckmarsh I guess.
Me: The suckmash? creative name... cool. The town of Dragon's End, where the dragon's go to drown, near the rott-wood, where the dog men live, in the nation of Suck-marsh... land of literal naming schemes. lol
I write all that down so I can use it when I make the hex map. For the rest of that session the PC's ran around town and got destroyed by dog-men and I asked some more questions.
When I start making my hex map I start with the town of 'dragon's End' right in the middle and start working out from there. First I draw the nation of suck-marsh. From questions I asked later in the session I know that the nation is "like Venice if Venice was a whole country" and that there is an ocean on both sides of it. I draw an amorphous blob around the town of dragons end, make it purple because it is called suckmarsh and put an ocean on either side. Now I know that there are forests nearby because it is a logging town. I know there is a river that leads to a city. I know that there are swamps everywhere. I know that there is the corpse of a drowned dragon not far away, and some kind of dog men camp in the woods. So I put a swamp to the right of the town a Forrest to the north and river to the south and where the river reaches the ocean I put a city. Now all I need to do is look to my hex rules.
My hex crawl rules:
1) each hex is approximately 15 miles in diameter. And takes one full day travel to cross if there is a road, two if there is no road and three is there are mountains swamps or some other obstetrical.
2) every hex must have something interesting in it. and every hex must mave a direct relationship with 3 of it's neighbors.
3) biomes or areas with different climates/terrain types are divided into nations. Try to give each nation two-three principle terrain types this also helps you define the culture of your nations and makes traveling interesting.
4) Only ever fill in the 6 hexes around where your party is. (Dungeon world rule: draw maps, leave blanks) Don't worry about grand scope. you will get there as players explore
5) when placing a new hex roll 1d10 if you roll between 1- 5 then the tile will become the same as the most common neighboring tile or the nation's principle terrain type. If you roll between 6-8 then you fill it with the second most common neighboring tile or the nation's second principle land type. If you roll 9-10 then place a terrain type that is uncommon or special.
6) break these rules whenever necessary to place quest or story locations and to incorporate the results of questions you ask players about the world but never ever ever remove or change a tile you have already placed
7) roads and rivers snake between hexes along diagonal lines. any hex with a road along it's border is counts as having a road for travel but only if the players are moving to the road's destination.
8) Draw roads between the capitol cities of nations and no where eles, these roads can meander and take detours as you wish and avoid rough terrain. you can have dirt tracks and narrative roads into and out of every town but the hex map will only display the major trade roads the "highways" so to speak and only these roads give travel bonuses.
all the tiles were rolled for via my above rules with just the town as dragon's end as a starting point. as you can see i ended up with a great big forrest swamps around the side and i used a wild roll to add some fields in the civilized areas. the cities towns and keeps were discovered in play and therefore added to the map.
i am running this hex crawl on roll20 so i can double click on the hex token and write info there. for instance this is the token description for that dead dragon tile you see beside dragon's end.
so you see. as this map grew this tile became more then just a dragon in a swamp it naturaly took on life. I suppose you could make some sort of random roll-able table to populate your hexes but i think that imagination is the best tool. you can use random encouter tables which are fairly easy to find and if your players are attacked by 20 roaming trolls then perhaps you should add a "troll village" to that hex. Adding published moduals is easy. just pop it in it's own couple hexes in the empty space away from the players and fill in the terrain between where they are and where the mdual starts all the while justifying tile relationships.
so far in this campaign the players have spent alot of time poking things with sticks and then running away. Wherever they go they have been unleashing chaos but never bothering to clean up afterwards and once they played the Death Frost Doom Dungeon they decided that they had pretty much ruined Suck-marsh forever and started running as fast as they could.
I know that there are much more detailed and specific hex-crawl rules out there but i dont want to spend 10 hours randomly generating and populating a map that the players wont get to see 90% of the time and which is set in stone once it is made. players want to know where the forrests are where the dungeons are and how to get to town, the gm wants to know what is in the woods, why there is a dungeon and how to kill the PC's before they get to town so this is how i do it.
If someone out there has a better way drop me a line! Cheers
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