Hexcrawl is an approach to planning, running and playing Dungeons & Dragons, and other tabletop roleplaying games, that prioritizes randomized exploration. 

Why should you make a Hexcrawl campaign

If you love video games like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild or Dark Souls, for the fact that you can venture anywhere and find something unexpectedly cool, then a hexcrawl campaign is the D&D equivalent to this. 

Maybe you want to plan and run an TTRPG campaign set in an epic world world where the player party’s goal is looser, like needing to find someone or something amongst this vast place, with the opportunity for adventure waiting around every corner. Perhaps you want to make a world that can support multiple storylines and campaigns, which is ideal for a hexcrawl style approach because of the replayability and randomness. 

Hexcrawl roleplaying is also great for using during sessions or games in which one or more of your core players aren’t able to attend. Rather than have them miss out on the main storyline, you could use a hexcrawl system to run sessions that aren’t progressing the story. 

What is Hexcrawl?

The Hexcrawl approach to GMing sits in the middle of the dungeon-crawling and theatre-of-the-mind styles of roleplaying. A hexcrawl campaign requires more planning and mapping than theatre-of-the-mind, but allows for more opportunities for randomness and player agency than dungeon-crawling.

Hexcrawl campaigns are almost entirely driven by maps and encounters. Rather than providing players with a menu of available locations to visit, hexcrawl maps are mainly designed for the GM to use as a tool to help drive the direction of the session. 

Each hex within a hexcrawl-style map should trigger a variety of potential events for the player party to encounter, depending on its location, environment type and any potential story or lore details it might have. These encounters then form the basis of the game and its story, with every new hex containing the potential for entirely new monsters to fight, secrets to discover, characters to meet and treasures to find. 

How do you create a hexcrawl map?

Find a background image 

To create your own hexcrawl map, you’ll need to find or make a background image depicting the general layout of the area you want to depict. If you’re not an accomplished artist, instead of struggling to draw your own background you can find a pre-existing image to use. Outside of searching for options online, Legendkeeper - which is our TTRPG worldbuilding app - features a collection of starter map images that could serve as the ideal background for your map (including a ready-made hexgrid map). 

Place a hex grid over the image

Once you have your background image, you’ll want to find a transparent hex grid PNG image to place on top of it, such as this one, which you can do with editing tools like Adobe Photoshop or even just Microsoft Paint. 

Create Hexcrawl keys

Hexcrawl maps feature a series of keys that help you, the DM/GM, figure out what it is that your players find when they enter into a particular hex. These keys can indicate information like what kind of environment each hex is, as well as notable landmarks and - most importantly - the sorts of encounters players will have within those hexes. 

There are two major steps to creating these keys: one, creating the content for the keys and two, applying the keys to your map. 

Devise environment types

Creating your hexcrawl content is the part where you’re able to give your imagination free reign. From a region of haunted ruins from an ancient civilization, to a cluster of picturesque but rival towns situated in close proximity to each other, you’re free to create whatever aspects and elements you can dream up for your world. It could be helpful to devise a handful of potential environments to include in your map - like swamps, grasslands, cities etc… - and then make a larger collection of unique versions of these: like poison swamps, standard swamps, swamps containing treasure, magical swamps and so on. 

Create encounters

On top of this, you’ll want to create a collection of encounters and elements for your players to come across when entering these hexes. You can do this on a larger scale - like making an encounter table for every grassland hex - and/or on a smaller scale, like a certain number of hexes on your map triggering some unique events. Consider the environment types, the kind of world you want to make and the sorts of stories you might want your players to experience, when making your encounters: think monsters, magical towers, dragon hoards, potion shops etc… You could have particular hexes trigger longer stories: like the previously mentioned cluster of rival towns, featuring an encounter wherein players can choose which towns to help in their competitions. These encounter prompts will serve as the jumping-off points, with however much additional planning you create being entirely up to you.

Make a good reference system

Once you’ve made your content, you’ll need to apply it to your hexcrawl map. You’ll do this by assigning numbers/letters/symbols etc… to your encounter tables and environment types, before placing these across your map in whichever configuration makes sense to your world (maybe there’s a large desert, boarded by a section of grassland containing some outposts etc…). 

One way of making life easier for yourself, particularly whilst actually running your TTRPG campaign, is to devise an efficient system for quickly switching between map and encounter tables and location details. You can do this very easily with Legendkeeper, thanks to its system of map pins and blocks. By placing pins on each hex of your map, you can apply a number/symbol/letter to it - indicating a key - as well as link those pins to wiki pages that feature the corresponding location details and encounter tables (you also can easily make tables using Legendkeeper’s fast formatting options). This means that during play, you can quickly select the pin on your player party’s current whereabouts, which will take you to the corresponding location and encounter page.

Good luck with creating your hexcrawl campaign! You can also learn more about how Legendkeeper can help with your RPG worldbuilding.