Hexcrawls vs Pointcrawls

Despite the header this is not a cage match between hexcrawls and pointcrawls. Pointcrawl reputation notwithstanding, I both love and use hex maps all the time in my campaign. Having run all kinds of wilderness in my campaign, I've started to become keenly aware of how each format complements certain types of outdoor gameplay.

Let's unpack the distinctions.

In a hexcrawl, the party is presented with a 360-degree, six-direction choice most every time it exits a hex. Terrain will often foster soft positive and negative natural choices, the presence of a road running into a different hex or a bordering “open” or “rough” hex (easy/quicker travel in a grasslands or what) codes incentivizes/deincentivizes choices.

The problem from a design perspective with that approach is this the “paradox of choice”, that lovely study that showed that an over-abundance of variables, tends to surprisingly reduce meaningful choice by causing option paralysis (that “fuck it, let's just do this” exasperation). And I believe that paradox often extends to the designer of the hexcrawl. I find making hex maps an incredibly quick (maybe too quick process) I think about the kinds of sub-regions I want, pop open hexographer and the map just flows out of geographic naturalism (or at least some kind of internal logic).

Unless you densely pack your hexes (I am insane about this) you end up with large amounts of empty hexes. Now you need pacing (and a sense of travel) and a principled sandbox GM just has to live with the fact that players may never see this or that thing you worked so hard to make, but it does mean at least for me that I can make some sub-optimal choices about placement.

A weird serendipity often hangs over the map when you start playing put these kinds of hexcrawls. The party runs this way and that way, sometimes running into a good run of interesting hexes, sometimes just somehow, inexplicably hitting the dullest string of hexes one could imagine.

A pointcrawl on the otherhand is all about the deliberate path choice of say a dungeon. You place a node much like a room with its doors and corridors leading out.

The drawbacks are much like that of dungeon design again. Make the decision choices too limited, too linear and/or too chokepointed and you end up straight-jacketing the players and making for a dull-ass map to explore.

Secondly it's also more challenging presenting an environment where wide-open wilderness exploration for its own sake is the goal. Sometimes you do want that 360-degree exploration/clearing or serendipity. Hexes give an exactness of space and have the advantage of being gridded with a recognizable number pattern. Being able to call a hex number is a convenient short-hand both for the GM during play and for players thinking about how to explore an outdoors area.

The punchline here is this...

I use a hex map when I want a campaign phase that...

1. mapping each hex on a blank map is a reward in itself.

2. clearing wilderness and creating your own hold is the goal.

3. is quick and dirty.

I use a pointcrawl when I want...

1. choice in travel and exploration to feel more deliberate and meaningful.

2. to highlight the major and minor sites in a wilderness as the major goals of exploration. (Revoca being an example of a pointcrawl hidden behind a hexmap).

3. well-thought-out, dense small sub-regions.

Oh and while I am on the subject, Luka (again for the umpteenth time in our collaboration) wowed me with this weekend with this beauty of a pointcrawl map for Misty Isles of the Eld. Maps can and should be beautiful also in themselves, no?

Do so click on me. 

Pointcrawl Series Index

One of the enduring thought experiments of this blog has been the pointcrawl, a concept which has passed into my brain by way of point-to-point wargames and Zork. Though I pose it as an alternative to hexcrawling in truth at the table for me it's more of a supplement, filling in and enhancing certain ways of running large spaces (hey there's probably a post in there).  This is the second edition of my own-going annotated index project for the blog. 

It's worth clicking on this. 

Pointcrawling

Crawling Without Hexes: the Pointcrawl

The meditation that kicked off the ongoing thread. An introduction and counter-position to hexcrawling.

Pointcrawling Sigil's Undercity

My first concrete attempt to adapt the pointcrawl concept to something other than wilderness. The post presents the known areas of Planescape's Sigil as a single pointcrawl map. This experiment helped me gel further non-hypothetical explorations in using pointcrawls to run undercities, megadungeons and city ruins.

Pointcrawling Undercities

An attempt to break down the horizontal hugeness of an undercity into a manageable form. Should be read in conjunction with this post. 

What's So Damn Hard About Running Ruined Cities?

In which I admit to having a difficulty in running city ruins and start to wrap my brain about how to do so. The comments are interesting and not surprisingly start pointing to pointcrawls.

Pointcrawling Ruins Revisited

Real needs in the Hill Cantons campaigns lead me to put into practice the stuff above. Some methods and guidelines for putting it all into practice.

Pointcrawling Ruins, Stocking Structures

Second part to the above post with a crowdsourced unique structures table and other practical bits.

Vertical Pointcrawling

Not only are undercities and megadungeons monsters of the horizontal dimension they can often become quite complicated with vertical connections. Here is an attempt to untangle that (and an experiment that only half-worked at the table).

Pointcrawling Inside Hexes

An example of how I use hexcrawl and pointcrawl maps in tandem, in this case how I often break out the contents of a single hex into a small area pointcrawl.

Win a Wargame Contest Results
Despite the unlikely title relevant as concrete examples of how to describe and present a point on a pointcrawl. 

Pointcrawling Inside Hexes

Many a virtual page has been sacrificed on this here blog in elaborating various pointcrawling schemes. One could leave with the impression that I was completely down on hex maps in general.

This is really not at all the case. I still find that hexes still have a great deal of utility. Their numbering system and wide-open organization are ideal for any campaign I run where thorough 360-degree exploration and domain game-like clearing are central activities (such as the new colonizing Feral Shore phase of the campaign). It makes it hella easy in that context to organize the session when the players just say “ok so let's explore some of the hexes around the fort, we will take 21.20 and hop on to 21.19 and 21.18”

But I just can't leave it alone.

When it comes to the nitty-gritty of the actual site organization of a single hex, I tend to fall back on using a pointcrawl nestled right up in the hex. My brain continues to rebel against the yawning emptiness of even the five-mile hex in traditional D&D wilderness hex thinking (that point being made so well here) and it needs to fill in that space with a number of small little “rooms.”

So when it comes down to that kind of micro-exploration, I like having the more focused choices of the dungeon and the point-connector schema mirrors that nicely.

How does mixing the two systems work?

A good starting point for showing what I am on about is to boogie back to my original inspiration for the idea, that wonderful old Avalon Hill warhorse (that I could never figure out how the hell to play with all my preciousness as a tween): Magic Realm. One of the most fascinating and visually-interesting components of the game were the hex geomorphs that allowed you to build a totally new gameboard everytime you played (they also could be flipped to reveal a nifty new purple-hued configuration when the hex was transformed by sorcery, but no need to go into that).

The hexes provide an interesting way to break down the hex into smaller areas and provide a number of constrained exploration choices and dilemmas for a party wanting to scout out the whole area. 

A single Magic Realm hex.

Unpunched for the full effect

My own system is a bit less “geomorphy,” the external connections into the hex are a bit more abstracted and free-form to push back on the “gaminess” and allow for multiple approaches into the hex. I use the same color and connector in my wilderness pointcrawl (rather than restate the whole thing just look here at the text right after the pointcrawl illustration). Here is a semi-hypothetical example. 

Contents of a mashed-up Feral Shore five-mile hex

The only significant difference is the scaling amount of time between points and the dots on connectors that represent extra travel time. On occasion my pure wilderness pointcrawls may include contours, I make greater use of these in the intra-hex pointcrawl.

That's really all there is. As always the system continues to evolve, some concepts getting dropped as too fiddly, others getting more elaboration over time.

Questions? Suggestions for improvement?

Vertical Pointcrawling

Longtime readers will note that I have spent a good deal of time working out how to organize horizontal space in the kind of pointcrawl format that works for the cracked hardwiring that is my brain. I've covered the wilderness, undercities, above-ground city ruins even the vast space underworld of Planescape's Sigil.

One thing that hasn't been touched on is some of the more complicated ways I have been using related schemes to add (literally at times) new dimensions to existing points: the vertical pointcrawl.

Let me back up and give you some background. A year or two back much of the eponymous campaign revolved around the exploration of the vast undercity Kezmarok. That space is on the whole organized with two horizontal pointcrawls: one above for a ruinscrawl of the sad old portions of the city and the more frequently-used undercity pointcrawl below.

It's mostly worked quite well on my end with the party in the main exploring and clearing various points each corresponding to a single sheet of graph paper. Recently in one of my favorite organic developments in a sandbox campaigns one of the PCs, Ba Chim the wereshark-landsknecht, has had to trade a favor, recover the artifact Spinning Wheel of Mokosh, to the archwizard Frantisek for a spell to regrow his burned off left leg.

This quest is taking them back to the undercity this time to a sub-level/structure called the Hypogeum of Vibaker in the Rubicand Caverns of Oldest Lhoma (there are at least three homage, in-jokes hidden in there).

Which roundabout gets me to the point(crawl), that system of caverns has taken up some undisclosed numbers of points on the horizontal pointcrawl. Here's my rub though, I had conceived them as a somewhat complicated series of vertically-layered caverns and though my horizontal scheme allows for some vertical organization by way of the various point connectors, it didn't really robustly support the kind of visual organization you would see for instance in the old cross-section maps stretching back to the famous ones in the LBBs of OD&D.

In other words, I wanted something that could break out a point (or related points) with a vertical organizer while maintaining the same spatial integration with a horizontal pointcrawl.

Thanks to medical necessities I had a lot of time on Tuesday to rework things. Here is a veiled and greatly simplified version of what I redid. There is nothing profoundly different here mind you, just a flipping of the axis with some different reworking of the connectors and color-coding to represent vertical differences.

Basically a few things are going on here.

One you will see a key at the bottom. Squiggly lines represent long staircases. Straight lines running vertically represent shafts (stupidly and confusingly I drew them horizontally here which should just represent normal horizontal connections) and dotted lines sloping tunnels or ramps. Normal connectors will run 10-30 minutes of travel, while a dot represents a long space or difficult to travel space with four hours of travel per dot.

Secondly, the colors map to this:

Light Green = Small, relatively low-ceilinged natural caves

Dark Green = Artificially-worked areas typically 10-15 feet high (dungeon)

Orange = Large caverns with soaring ceilings.

I still feel like this missing something and that naturally bothers me. Maybe something that jumps out to you the reader?

Pointcrawling Ruins, Stocking Structures

Onwards and upwards to part two of my series on Ruinscrawling. Stocking a ruined city with it's rather large and diverse range of habitations is another of the bigger hurdles to running such a beast. If you are like me you are pretty deliberate in planning the big ticket adventure sites (the abandoned palace, great temple and the like) and the barebones city planning elements (residential areas are here, ceremonial there) but tend to get stuck sometime in the brainstorming of each specific sub-zone.

Here are two random charts to help you unstick your brain in that process. Remember that the Non-Stupid Rule is in effect, ignore any results that contradict your image of who the builders of the site where or what you are going for as a challenge.

(A large round of special thanks to all the crowdsourcers on Google Plus for the decidedly weird second chart, see here for the individual descriptions in their more verbose, wonderful state.)

Point Type and Structures

Roll d100

01-20	Rubble Field (Type 1)
21-30	Freestanding Walls, No Structure (Type 2)
31-32	Abandoned Garden/Field/Orchard/Quarry (Type 1-3)
33	Neglected Canal/Lake/Pool/Fountain (Type 1-3)
34-37	City Walls/Fortification/Towers/Barracks (Type 2-5)
38-45	Lower Class Residential, Low Density (Type 2-3)
46-50	Lower Class Tenement (Type 2-4)
51-54	Middle Class Residential, Low Density (Type 2-4)
55-58	Middle Class Tenement/Rowhouse (Type 2-4)
59-60	Upper Class Residential (Type 2-5)
61-63	Small Market/Market Square/Bazaar (Type 2-4)
64-67	Artisan Workshops/Manufactory/Foundry (Type 2-4)
68-70	Warehouse/Granary/Silo (Type 2-4)
71-72	Plaza/Agora/Forum/Square (Type 2-4)
73-74	Gaol/Prison (Type 2-5)
75-80	Small Temple/Shrine/Fane/Sick House (Type 2-4)
81-83	Large Temple/Cathedral (Type 2-5)
84-85	Courts/Custom House/Public Official/Library (Type 2-5)
86	Palace
87-95	Mixed Usage (Roll Twice)
96-00	Unusual (see chart below)

Modifiers:

Ruins originate in Advanced Builder Civilization +5

Ruins originate in High Weirdness +10

Unusual Structures

Roll d10, All Type 3-5

01-02 Necropolis

03-04 Cemetery

05-06 Crematorium

07-08 Death House

09-10 Ossuary

11-12 Aqueduct

12-13 Qanat 

14-15 Bath Houses

16-17 Gladiatorial Arena

18-19 Observatory

20-21 Scriptorium

22-23 Oracular Well/Cave/Grove
24-25 Triumphant Arch/Monument/Tower

26-27 Temple Brothel

28-29 Pagoda, Giant

30-31 Boulevard of Monumental Statutes

32-33 Semaphore/Signaling Tower

34-35 Giant Ceremonial Bell/Gong

36-37 Hermae Row
38-39 Lingam and Yoni 

40-41 Oubliette, Penal
42-43 Oubliette, Meditatory

44-45 Yakhchal 

46-47 Vomitorium, Misinterpreted 

48-49 Windcatcher 

50-51 Tarpeian Rock 

52-53 Mud Baths
54-55 Tar Pits
56-57 Strangling Bog
58-59 Circumcisorium
60-61 Giant Statue Head

62-63 Ozymandius Feet

64-65 Megalith

66-67 Ball Court (50% Sacrificial)
68-69 Cenote (50% Sacrificial)
70-71 Orgone Accumulatorium
72-73 Floating Object, Random

74-75 Conical Ziggurat

76-77 Featureless Cube

78-79 Iron Pillar, Unrusting

80-81 Ceremonial Spawning Pool

82-83 Doorless Sealed Shrine
84-85 Lair, Sacred Beast/Guardian/Local Demigod
86-87 Confusatorium (?)
88-89 Condominiums, wretched servitor beast
90-91 Olympic-style village, defunded
92-93 Headquarters, League of Demigods

94-95 Golden Stupa

96-97 Crystalline Dome

98 Corral, Massive Monster

99 Punishment Tube

00 Mollusk Garden

Modifiers:

Somewhat Mundane Civilization -10

Pointcrawling Ruins Revisited

With the Nefarious Nine poised right on the edge of exploring for the first time the big kahuna adventure site of the Feral Shore, the city ruins of the Rusevin, my head is back in the game around how to actually run such a beast.

Longtime readers will remember my attempts to untwist my head around all the cognitive leaps one has to take to do this effectively. The awkward scale problem—city ruins teeter between the micro-exploration of the dungeon and the macro-scale of wilderness crawls—was a major impediment and naturally my mind when back to the pointcrawling model that has been a longstanding theme here.

Taking off from my last installment on that subject (with a bit of restatement to remind both myself and readers where this was going) here is the first part of the system I will be using. A sanitized (and modified just enough to screw with expectations) system for randomly stocking structures, encounters, thematic elements, and other elements will be thrown out in a second part of this series (and maybe a third if it goes overly long).

Point Scale and Types

Each Point Size represents an area of the ruins roughly 100 yards by 100 yard squares. It is the top-level representation of space in the ruins.

Each point, in theory, corresponds to a nestled maps of standard four square/inch graph paper with 10-foot to a square. In reality many Type 1-3 points will lack them altogether or have geomorph stand-ins unless there is a significant adventure site in the point. Some special sites with a high adventure site density will have two nestled maps.

Types of Ruins Points (Color-Coded):

Type 1 (Red). Completely ruined or razed area, walls and other structures indistinguishable and now just rubble.

Type 2 (Orange). Completely ruined areas. Surface areas nearly identical to Type 1 above (with occasional free-standing walls), but underground areas (cellars, dungeons and the like) may still be intact if rubble is cleared away.

Type 3 (Yellow). Mostly ruined area. Some may walls exist and structures may be distinct but nearly always lack roofs and upper stories. Underground areas may be existent.

Type 4 (Green). Semi-ruined area. A number of structures are relatively intact with roofs and walls (though there may be holes in both). The relatively intact structures will be interspersed with rubble or partially ruined buildings. Underground areas are often existent.

Type 5 (Blue) Barely ruined area. Most structures in the area are intact with minor neglect. Will often be inhabited with recent repairs done by sentient locals.

Visibility

With an unblocked line of sight, characters can make out significant details up to 3 point locations and general details (what type of ruin it is, large structures, large-scale movement) up to 10 points away before being obscured.

Clear unruined points and Type 1-2 ruins do not obstruct line of sight. Type 3-5 obstruct it and the line of sight will stop at that square. Large or high structures may block line of sight, but will themselves be readily seen (naturally) at the GM's discretion.

Climbing a roof or other elevated spot will add a point of visibility for each 10 foot floor equivalent climbed.

Example: Gurgi, Master of Tables, is in a Type 1 rubble field point. He can see through two points of the surrounding Type 1 squares (200 yards in each direction) but his line of sight after that is blocked by a ring of Type 4 buildings. The hirsute hireling climbs a ruined 30-foot bulbed tower and from that high point can see past the ring into two-points (or a further 200 yards) of Type 4 and 5 buildings in all directions. 

Movement

Movement is assumed to be “exploration speed” (cautious movement watching for critters and structure details with mapping). Normal movement should be at twice speed and running like hell at triple. Wandering monster checks will be at “dungeon” levels (once per turn) in dangerous areas of the ruins and once per three turns in “safer” areas (partially inhabited by non-hostiles or mostly empty Type 1-2).

Dotted Line. Movement is relatively free and often over a field of rubble. One turn to traverse connection.

Single Line. Small streets that may have an occasional obstruction. One turn to traverse.

Double Line. Open avenues, boulevards or obstruction-free roads. Half turn to traverse.

Broken Line. Movement is difficult, perhaps only through thickly-rubbled and ruined roads. Two turns to traverse.

Pointcrawling Undercities

Today we resume where I left off with Tuesday's “Designing Undercities” post. (Those late night Google Plus marathon sessions of the Hill Cantons invariably kick the tar out of my aging butt--but then again you get what you paid for on this blog.)

Remember the project here is to create a mapping system that helps wrap your brain around the vast and complicated spatial dimensions of a full-fledged undercity. I turn to my old standby in visual organization, the pointcrawl, for some help here. (Longtime readers may remember that I tried to do this once before in thinking about the Realms Below of Sigil.) 

Let's recap the difficulties I was facing and how a pointcrawl system may help:

Historical layers. Tuesday I worked through a vertical cross-section method (reposted above). That process helped immensely in giving me an overall sense of the relationships and history of the differing phases of the undercity, but to effectively run it my badly-wired brain is also going to need some 2D top-down organization. I can capture that kind of mapping fairly easily using only 1-3 letter-sized pieces of graph paper with the pointcrawl method. 

Vast areas of empty space. Remember unlike a megadungeon which typically has a lot of contiguous space relatively tightly-packed the undercity sprawls both horizontally and vertically over much larger areas. Outside of a touch-every-doorknob OCD obsession there really is no need to waste much time and effort representing them—except for the all important dimension of where they lead, how much time traversing it takes, and potential obstacles in that path. In the pointcrawl we solve this by using a combination of lines and symbols that can tell us at a glance all the relevant information we need to know.

Losing the best bits. Related to the above point is the danger of having your most interesting points from a gaming perspective get swamped by the scale. Instead let's take each of those sites and mark them on the map with nice big distinct squares of their own.

Though only represented by a single abstract square each site will get the full detailed, standard graph paper mapping. The squares are abstracted units but my usual rule of thumb is to have a single piece of letter-sized graph paper correspond to each square. A duller area such as a small, residential housing may get collapsed into a single sheet with a larger ground scale and a really interesting or complicated site, especially one that has distinct sub-levels, may need a second or third sheet to back it up.

Entry points and vertical connections get hella confusing. Because they are big spaces that have seen years and years of habitation (of varying degrees) the chance of connections from the surface and between layers is likely to be exponentially higher than a standard dungeon. While it would likely drive you into a rubber room trying to capture each and every one, it helps create an interesting array of explorations options for the players if you have as many as you can captured. The pointcrawl simplifies the complicated dance of lining up horizontal with vertical space by treating vertical connections as simply as the empty spaces: a single line with some simple notation suffices.

Putting it all together here's yesterday's sample undercity as represented by a pointcrawl map. Click to enlarge.

Pointcrawl Map Key

The Lines

Unbroken lines = normal walkable passages (tunnel, corridor, etc)

Squiggly lines = unusual connector (teleportation, magic gate, etc.)

Arrow on line = vertical drop in the direction indicated (stairs, chutes, pits, wells, abysses, etc)

Two bars on line = barrier in passage (cave in, mudslide, locked gate, turnstile, giant critter, etc.)

Number in circle on line = confusing passage (twisty catacombs, maze, cavern system, etc) with number indicating roll for getting lost on a roll or below on a d6. Modify if party employs precautions such as chalking passages, using appropriate spells, hiring guide, and the like.

Dot on line = 3 hours of walking at normal, unencumbered pace along passage.

The Squares

Uncolored square = Recent human civilization mostly on the surface and drawn here to indicate entry points.

Maroon square = Serpent Woman layer, the uppermost layer of the undercity.

Yellow square = Space Elf layer, the second closest historical layer.

Orange square = Latter State layer, second from bottom.

Blue square = Hyperborean layer, bottom most.

I have marched through organizing the physical and conceptual map of my undercity, now we need to get into dealing with the further complication of this beast being a living, breathing social animal: the city part of the “undercity”. Look forward to at least one or more posts picking apart those angle.

Any questions about today's method? Is it clear what I am trying to do with this and how it fits together? Suggestions or opinions on how you think this could be done in different ways?

Pointcrawling Sigil's Undercity

In yesterday's post about the megadungeon possibilities missed in Planescape's hub city, Sigil, Michael Moscrip asked very nice and polite like for a setting supplement. Since he's ill-advisedly talked about running a Dickensian-like Sigil adventure—even going as far as to create a portal to it from the Google Plus pocket universe's Castle Nicodemus–it's in my enlightened self-interest to help out.

I am way too swamped to do a great sweeping treatment, but here's a stab at a few things to get someone going on creating a Sigil underworld of their own.

First of all, we have to deal with John's good, tough question from yesterday:

“My trouble with the Catacombs is that, in a way, they're too big. On the one hand I like the idea of the entire torus being riddled with dungeon passages. But if I have one entrance in the Twelve Factols and another entrance in the skull library, ten miles away, how can I ever link them up in a way that matters? For all practical purposes they're two separate dungeons. Do I "cheat" with miles and miles of empty passageways? Weird dungeon spatial warping?”

Yes to both seems most appropriate given what we know, namely that most of the undercity was created as work and living space by the tinkering dabus and that as many inter-dimensional gates exist below as they do above. If this section is to be believed you have something as reality-defying as the Mythic Underworld:

“Nobody's ever dug so deep that they come to the 'other side' of Sigil's toroidal surface. Those who dig deep enough simply disappear, presumably stumbling into a random plane, and nobody's ever been able to figure out a pattern to it.”

So how do you run such a sprawling beast? I suggested trying to apply my pointcrawl system (John answers his own question with some interesting remarks about a hex-based solution in the comments).

Above is a pointcrawl map listing every site that gets a mention in canonical material. Underscoring yesterday's point all but two of the sites, the Gurincraag (a dwarven neighborhood under the Lower Ward) and the Twelve Factols Inn (mentioned yesterday), are drawn from Torment.

Large boxes indicate major sites, worthy of a single dungeon level or two. Green boxes indicate a site that has humans or other overworld living creatures living there, blue indicate wholly “monster”-inhabited levels. The smaller uncolored boxes indicate “sublevels”, special areas that would typically be 2-10 rooms in a normal dungeon.

Unbroken lines indicate the more normal walkable tunnels and other . Squiggly lines indicate places joined by a “teleporting” portal (all such portals have some kind of material key to them). Arrows indicate that the connection leads downward in that direction. Connections should be of variable length and indicated on the map (out of laziness I didn't).

What about stocking these places? Here's where I am going to punt. Since the vast majority of this space is treated in the computer game—many of these areas get a highly detailed treatment in the numerous online walkthroughs of the game. You will find a number of useful links to maps and descriptions on the various levels and sub-levels here at Sorcerers.net.

Eyeballing these maps they feel too cramped, too square and oddish in shape to be a perfect fit for tabletop maps—and you have to deal with the meta-gamey knowledge of those who have played through—I would strongly advise using them as a launching pad, expanding the maps and areas over longer dimensions.

End of backseat driving, now go and build.  

Crawling Without Hexes: the Pointcrawl

Despite spending 1-2 hours a day sinking psychic energy into this here rpg blog, I am still as much or more of a wargamer as I am a roleplayer. There have been too many years of pushing little lead men and cardboard counters to deny it.

Hexes literally come with the terrain in both worlds. Yet as much as I love that old six-directional organization in my wargaming--where relative position is a top priority--I have to admit that I find them not terribly useful in running day-to-day wilderness exploration in my games.

Don't get me wrong, I still use hex maps, but they have been relegated to only one of several layers of maps I use in campaigns. Right below a top level “symbolic” map (a map, often shared with players, filled with out-of-scale markings and illustrations distorting things by their relative importance) is often a large-scale map of six-mile hexes.

Neither layer of map is what I actually use at the table.

What I actually use at the table are two kinds of hexless map systems: the first being a point-to-point system (the second a “vector” map akin to the West Marches that I may discuss tomorrow).

What's point-to-point? Simple, it's a map that replaces hexes with locations and connectors only. Fortunately I didn't have to invent another wheel, but looked to some old favorite wargames. Take the map from the Civil War classic A House Divided pictured below.

Why bother switching? Because a hex map places “empty space” areas, the countless hexes that may contain nothing much of interest, on the same semiotic level as interesting locales (and by interesting I mean a wide latitude of things from minor curiosities/landmarks to settlements or adventure sites, any point that is worth more than a cursory description). It reduces the amount of information I can see at a glance and the paper shuffling between hex map and gazetteer becomes a stage management nightmare for me when I run a game.

Secondly, hex maps tend to play down the fact that most overland travel is rightly conducted along some kind of track or road. Pathless travel is exhausting, massively disorienting, and dangerous to the point that even something as rough as a mule track or a game path is usually preferable.

Hex maps also tend to not be able to show impassable terrain on a granular level, cliffs or peaks that prevent a line of travel or wetlands areas where the water gets too deep. Note how paths bottleneck in mountain and coastal wetlands areas in the House Divided map. I want to be able to portray the situation where an area maybe be close by how the crow flies but involves a circuitous route by foot. I also want those bottlenecks—places of “strategic” importance to find or hold.

This is what my typical PbP map looks like (click to enlarge).

The squares represent the sites of interest and are color coded with map pencils for ease of reference. In this case, dark blue equals a settlement a town or larger (sky blue is for smaller ones), green is a landmark, and brown is a potential adventure site with its own sub-map.

I always draw in terrain as background under the grid (note the bands of hills and mountains) roughly to scale from the higher-layer hex map. This reminds me exactly where topography begins and ends if I need to use it in-game—and what type of encounter or weather chart to use. I use a wide range of terrain and vegetation type, so this is especially important for me.

Now let's look at the all-important connectors. Solid lines represent roads, double solid lines Roman-like roads with sturdy road beds. Broken lines represent tracks. I will add letters if I need to code the path further, “S” represents a secret or hidden path, for instance, “G” stands for a game path that the party will need an outdoorsman-type to find and use. Rivers and creeks can also be used as connectors.

The dots on connectors play a big role in simplifying things, they are the units of measurement between squares. They typically represent about six hours of unencumbered walking and three hours of normal riding time. If a connecting path is shorter or longer or more difficult I note it directly on the map. The typical foot time just happens to correspond to my encounter checks. The system lends itself to wanting to minimize too many dots, so I tend to brainstorm lots of green-coded minor landmark boxes to both give players more choice in direction and make travel seem more colorful.

The last thing you will note are random notes to myself (the chance for finding on a d6 the stairs to a cave system under the Old Tower square, for instance.) This on-map notation plays a big part in helping me run the game at the table and my actual maps will get very busy with them. Again I can't emphasize enough how helpful this is ease to play flow.

That's one of my systems. I know you devious people have your own. What's up your wilderness-running sleeve?