ICRPG Hexcrawl

#1

I’ve been reading a few OSR books lately and, while I dig them, I still feel ICRPG offers the most streamlined and dynamic experience. However, I’m now itching to run a hexcrawl. Which have you played, and are your favorite? Which do you recommend? Thankya, shields.

#2

I ran one, The Treasure Vaults of Zadabad (using Dungeon Crawl Classics), but I was meh about it after a while. I don’t think I ran it correctly: didn’t track resources, no risk of getting lost; we really just wanted to get to the encounters and not explore the island.

This, however, is not a dig on the adventure, just the way I ran it. It’s actually got some cool bits in it.

Given that, I think there’s a (best?) way to run a hexcrawl but I don’t know what it is. I think your players would have to buy into it for sure.

#3

The youtube channel, WebDM has a two good videos on hexcrawls: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGUPmGZdZFM&t=593s and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwB2HpDfxEY

Hexcrawlers are about exploration, so you want to give them both a reason to explore and at least two destinations beyond their starting location that they might have heard something about. Like for instance if you have a particular adventure you want to run, throw that location on the map as their first lead to adventure.

I would also ask your players if they would actually be interested in this type of game in the first place. Hexcrawls run better as survival simulators in a way, resources need to be tracked, chances to get lost or injured, etc. This is in addition to normal random encounters, on that as a side note I would put both good results and bad results on your encounter tables - always thought it was lame how you only get orcs and demons on an encounter table, but never wandering friendlies.

I have run a very successful hexcrawl campaign with nothing but well designed random encounter tables, and the players thought I had written out this grand adventure for them. When the game was over, they asked what module I had used, and I just showed them my five sheets of paper I had random encounter tables on lol.

In the old school days of D&D, there were no wilderness survival rules so they used this boardgame called Outdoor Survival for long distance overland travel. That game was very unforgiving, but I always thought it simulated wilderness survival in a harsh world pretty well.

Ok I’m done rambling lol.

#4

I wrote a hexcrawl some years back; if I weren’t biased, I’d say it’s very good…

#5

Thank you. I can definitely see how you’ve get to properly set the stage due a hexcrawl. I’ll be giving those videos a watch in a minute :+1:t3:

#6

Oh nice! There’s quite a bit there and I’ll be printing it out to give it a proper read. Thank you.

#7

I just recently ran a first session of “Bone Marshes” a hex crawl and mini-campaign (or several one-shots) primarily designed around Ben Milton’s “Knave” RPG system, but it can easily be adapted to ICRPG since it’s d20 based.

Its plots push the characters to actually explore, map locations, and discover interesting things as they progress. Lot’s of little puzzles and mysteries to solve. I enjoyed the random encounter tables and the monsters were pretty creative.

#8

I’ll definitely check that out. Want to run a West March style hex crawl for my local shop. Thanks for the link.

#9

By the way, check out the ICRPG one sheet I recently posted. Very Knave inspired.